Day-To-Day Work Logs and Woot! Engine Stuff!

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Sep 19, 2012.

  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    This thread is reserved for discussing things in day-to-day blogposts about development and Woot Engine Stuff.
     
    Turbo164, Bandus and Kazeto like this.
  2. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Kazeto and Turbo164 like this.
  3. Bandus

    Bandus Member

    Looking forward to reading these! Thanks for keeping the community informed!
     
  4. Hawk

    Hawk Member

    Looking good, thanks guys
     
  5. omeg

    omeg Member

    Great stuff. I love how the windmills have only two wings. :)
    So you've developed your own GUI library? Any reason for not going with something available (like Garry's GWEN or something)?
     
  6. EvilCyst

    EvilCyst Member

    Awesome. Keep it up!
     
  7. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

  8. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    If the game will be pushed in that direction until the end then I really will waste part of my life on it after it's out...

    Keep up the good work.
     
  9. Bandus

    Bandus Member

    Every time I read "Perfectly Safe" I cackle manically. Awesome insight into how industry will work in CE!
     
    Kazeto likes this.
  10. SangerZonvolt

    SangerZonvolt Member

    The building system looks aswesome, can´t wait to create a completely automatic city.

    One suggestion though: I would find it great if automatic wouldn´t mean better, just more.

    For example you could have a factory massproducing standard weapons or a single master-weaponsmith creating awesome weapons very slowly per hand. SO you´d have to decide between massproduced low quality stuff and very slowly produced high quality stuff.
     
    Vitellozzo and Kazeto like this.
  11. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    This introduces a few problems: tracking the quality of individual goods in data, showing quality to the player in a way that doesn't cause information overload with everything else going on in the game at the same time, and the matter of whether to have players make decisions about which of those goods of what quality to use where.

    Does a player have to tell soldiers, individually, which quality of muskets to use? Or maybe soldiers always grab the best quality as soon as they can? But what if that's not what the player wants, what if they want to sell the high quality muskets for cash -- is there a toggle button for this hidden somewhere? How do you tell if a musket is high-quality at a glance without making people click through information windows? (Tooltips? On items held by moving characters? Make them glow funny colours? Hmm.)

    It should suffice to say that we've discussed the issue internally a good deal. Our default move will be to aim for the 'minimum viable game' implementation - just muskets, one quality - then see if it is necessary and reasonable to expand the complexity of the system from there.
     
  12. Vitellozzo

    Vitellozzo Member

    It could have a Dwarf Fortress like military interface: you can create "uniforms", which are custom sets of armor/weapons/vestiary. This can lead to specialized units against non-specialized ones, which have access to a greater number of equipment.
    Anyway, we don't need a DF clone, so the way you'll create it will be good for us.
    After all, if it will supports mod, it means it can be modified, also by you devs - which means that something you wanna change can be changed when you want (not that cannot be done in a game without mod support, just saying).
    The building system is gold.
     
  13. Man I always forget there's a blog. Going to read these.
     
    Vitellozzo likes this.
  14. IDK how well DF's implementation is as a model though, 'cause it's really complicated and not easy to pick up (even compared to the rest of the game)

    Would a possibility though be to implement an artifact type system where like, occasionally your master craftsman will produce a gun that shoots electric bees or has some other procedurally generated qualities that make it unique? (and since these can't be mass produced it doesn't add the same level of interface complexity; ie you tell people to do stuff with muskets they just use mundane muskets and you have to specify some elite troop to use electric-bee-muskets? IDK)

    I assume also you've probably all thought of this >.<
     
    Mashirafen likes this.
  15. Kamisma

    Kamisma Member

    The DF way is terrible I fear, well maybe it's because of the god-awful UI of DF, or the fact the equipment system is to intricate (planning all the layers of an armor, from clothing, leather padding, then plate armor, ammunitions, weapons, water and booze supply,, then different quality and materials, .... having a headache just thinking about it).

    I think the overall design of the game is already at a sound point of complexity. I'd actually prefer if items could be affected by madness rather than quality.
     
    r_b_bergstrom likes this.
  16. Vitellozzo

    Vitellozzo Member

    The fact is, one must not copy 1:1 everything, but burrowing something it's good for making new stuff.
    And since I don't think there will be adamantine plate armours and urchin helms, there is no need to create such a complexity. But something like "kind of weapon/quality of weapon/kind of uniform" can be useful, since you don't need, at that point, to program different units: every unit use the weapon that was absigned to him. The qualities can be just "mass produced, crap, artifact handmade", and I don't think there will be more than one-two materials for weapon, since there are standards to follow.
    This is just to mantain a somewhat kind of differentiation for the different kind of producers, since at this point it seems that the factory is better of everything else, as long you have lot's of factories and some kind of energy productor.
    But those are speculations, of course.
     
  17. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

    Kazeto and Daynab like this.
  18. omeg

    omeg Member

    Awesome. FSM should be appropriate for what you're doing with the AI.

    Did you mean The plan is to start simply, and add layers of complexity to the game until it becomes self-conscious and the player's mind is unable to cope and he's overtaken by eldritch forces?

    Also that artwork is creepy.
     
  19. Kamisma

    Kamisma Member

    This is a game about -weird- science and -bizarre- industry after all. I expect that i will build shittons of 'perfectly safe- factories of different kinds, with different -totally stable- energy sources, and connecting everything with -crazy- supply chains that will absolutely not malfunction in insane ways.
     
    Vitellozzo likes this.
  20. Vitellozzo

    Vitellozzo Member

    Ok ok, I got the point and I'm now totally supporting this.
    So who is ready to make some !SCIENCE!?