ALPHA 45A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Dec 8, 2015.

  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Alpha 45A is in the Experimental Branch on Steam. Some notes: I rewrote the save game code to handle the problems people were having saving and loading really large colonies; please let me know if there are any issues. Otherwise, we have rolled in the boxed module stuff and a first swing at the foreign office, and all sorts of horrors and things. So... uh, yeah. This is probably going to be An Exciting Few Days(TM)

    Changelog:
    • added Boxed Module production/construction: (most) modules are now constructed in workshops rather than in-place. Most non-decor modules now work with this system.
    • added Building Quality tutorial
    • added ability to register an object as being, or not being, a trade good. (preparation for trade depot system)
    • adding skillup thought bubble + memory
    • colonists who are maddened or cultists will enjoy creepy dancing rather than be upset
    • airdrop crates now love doomed characters
    • implemented various memory efficiency operations for loading very long, very large save games with an unreasonable number of goods lying around
    • rally beacons will self-delete after a day (so that soldiers don't accidentally starve to death)
    • changed "gathering" skill name to "naturalism" in prep for future skill overhaul
    • balance: set new skill levelup values appropriate for each profession
    • balance: Chapel-assigned workcrew labourers can now take confession
    • added first implementation of foreign office, connected prestige system to empire faction interaction within foreign office. (work still to do includes: exposing current standing data with each faction, exposing data for how each mission affects faction standing, reworking bandit events and foreign faction events to be based on faction standing, and populating periodic passive and choice-based events for each faction related to current faction standing instead of using graph traversal (whew, yeah, there's a lot still to go here))
    • UI: expanded workshop UI code to allow for more recipes since we have boxed modules now
    • FIXED: Refining Tutorial scripterror
    • FIXED: materials costs for several decor modules
    • FIXED some weird bugs with progress bars
    • FIXED: "unique" tag now works on gameSimRequireGameObject::RequirementMet (previously it didn't) (this is important for jobs that require multiple instances of the same commodity)
    • FIXED: vicar deprogram cultist job would occasionally freeze the cultist in place forever
    • FIXED: some typos in events
    • FIXED: manually cancelling burial will stop automatic burial (again)
    • FIXED: dissecting fishpeople could freeze game
    • FIXED: various minor issues w/ dissecting horrors
    • FIXED: goods stolen by bandits will be subtracted from colony commodity counts
    • FIXED: people will no longer attend sermons while carrying hoes (nor will they seek services of the barber or pub while carrying tools)
    • FIXED: colonists sleeping in chapels will no longer receive positive memories for having attended a sermon (they will instead be rudely awoken)
    • FIXED: skill progression bar variations were not being displayed correctly
    • FIXED: repair alerts will reference material name required rather than internal tag string
    • FIXED: corrected incorrect text in naturalist_study_fishperson_corpse event
     
  2. Unforked

    Unforked Member


    Are there surprise horrors not mentioned in the changelog? Otherwise I suppose creepy dancing and doomed folks getting bonked with crates could be considered horrors.

    Anyway, very excited to test the crate system!
     
  3. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    No, no surprise horrors. Also, the fire and trade depots aren't in yet because they still need some love (and in the case of the trade depot, a complicated system of AI programming so that Stahlmarkians will lug surplus cabbage correctly to your trade depot for Purposes.)
     
  4. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    *hugs*
     
    Marak likes this.
  5. grayfox687

    grayfox687 Member

    Read this, thought "what is a fire depot? Because it sounds super awesome"

    Did you fix it to make them attend sermons with torches and pitchforks? ;)
     
  6. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    "airdrop crates now love doomed characters"

    lmao

    "FIXED: colonists sleeping in chapels will no longer receive positive memories for having attended a sermon (they will instead be rudely awoken)"

    Boo-urns :)
     
    Marak likes this.
  7. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    After a thirteen day session:

    • Module system works as advertised. It took a little getting used to, but I can see the benefits down the line.
    • Modules don't show up in the commodities menu, and they're unmarked boxes in your stockpile, so doing an inventory is a bit of a hassle.
    • The free-standing lampposts are new right? I love them, but they don't seem to cost any materials. I'm building them everywhere for free!
    • The foreign office confused me at first, since it seemed like I couldn't earn any prestige until I built one. The three prestige award options seem to switch around inexplicably, but I get that this is a WIP.
    Here's the only weirdness I ran into. Happened out of nowhere when I had the window open. When I closed out and re-clicked the foreign office it worked fine again.

    2015-12-08_00001.jpg
     
  8. grayfox687

    grayfox687 Member

    The Carpentry workshop doesn't seem to automatically produce modules that have been placed in buildings. Is this by design?
     
  9. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

    Yes. You have to queue them manually. We ... COULD make it autoqueue them but this could run into issues if you have multiple workshops, want to save the resources for something else, etc.
     
  10. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

    Those weren't ready for primetime yet! :( How did they make it into the build?
     
    Kamisma and Marak like this.
  11. Daniel

    Daniel CEO Staff Member

    Looking into it, thanks!

    We've discussed it at length, and the current plan is that we won't auto-generate the module construction jobs. Doing so would put us in a weird place where players (especially new players) might not understand what was happening with some modules being able to be produced on the fly vs not, and if we figured that out we'd have to figure out how to prioritize automatically generated jobs over standing orders which is probably impossible given that players use S.Os both for high priority and for low priority jobs.
     
  12. Daniel

    Daniel CEO Staff Member

    That too. It gets probably too complicated to have an intuitive default case.
     
  13. grayfox687

    grayfox687 Member

    Okay, that makes sense, and it's fairly clear now which ones require the carpentry workshop to make, since they have that wacky stand in face instead of materials listed for creation.
     
  14. Daniel

    Daniel CEO Staff Member

    I know you're all more excited about the crates (they're awesome), but you have no idea how pumped I am for the foreign office. That paperwork is going to get serious.
     
    Kamisma and Marak like this.
  15. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    Hey, watch whose face you call wacky!
     
  16. grayfox687

    grayfox687 Member

    Ha! What I meant to say was "Perfectly normal face making a wacky expression"

    Also has anyone else noticed that the items required to make a smithing forge, (gears, iron pipes, and iron plates) can only, at least according to the tooltips, be made if you already have a smithing forge?
     
  17. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

    GAK.
    I remember suspecting there was an economic hole here somewhere but I think I forgot to plug it in the chaos of setting everything else up. I'll figure something out. Probably change the costs on building forges, they're overpriced.

    EDIT: it looks like it's just the tooltip that's wrong? It might be okay and I may have nerfed the price already previously
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2015
  18. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    I see no mention of the barracks finally allowing us to configure loadouts... We have been teased with images of this feature in two weekly blogs... Any word on when we will see it?
     
  19. Daniel

    Daniel CEO Staff Member

    It's in a weird place right now, where Nicholas is halfway through some AI code to use the loadouts, but I'm doing most of the UI implementation. We have had to work on other things the last few weeks to unblock content pipelines, but that seems to almost be over.
     
    STGGrant likes this.
  20. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member