Clockwork Empires January Update: Enola Brimble’s FINE DAY In Which Everything ISN’T Going To Explode
Our January update is now up on Steam! Whoa, that's a lot of monthly updates. Highlights of today's patch include:
Dustier Dust!
Mines and module maintenance!
Lots of UI/UX improvements!
A multitude of fixes, listed below, which embody a perhaps semi-successful attempt to make the “theme”, if you will, of this monthly update the fact that we didn’t focus on one easy-to-describe feature!
Engine
FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
job system performance improvement
FIXED: save game crash caused by having dirty objects in the rendInteractiveObjectClassHandler cleanup list when you save (we think)
FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
Events
starting supplies now drop from the sky (look out!)
balance: immigration and favour events fire less often
FIXED: supply drop event will no longer inform you that you’ve requested zero items when you forgo a supply drop
balance: made colonists less hungry on gamestart (unless they’re criminals)
FIXED: when you call a Naturalist via favour, you actually get a naturalist now rather than an artisan
Human Characters
FIXED: Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
FIXED: starvation was checking a value 10x what it should have been
FIXED: soldiers now actually move to rally beacons
FIXED: colonists no longer believe that raw coconuts are a cooked food
added Zzz particles to sleeping
balance: removed starting naturalist (you must earn one via favour)
removed extra pouches from the Scientist models (with apologies to Rob Liefeld)
FIXED: “forage due to starvation” job wasn’t triggering
started overhaul of job balance
(added new internal tool for balancing job requirements and utilities; this is super cool for us and will ultimately mean a better-balanced game experience for you).
FIXED: disappearing hair bug
cleanup of character hair models & model defs (more varieties of hair will show up)
unique macroscope use animations added
FIXED: de-assigned science workers wouldn’t give up their uniforms
FIXED incorrect icons for eating human flesh
FIXED: hunger no longer goes negative after character eats when not very hungry
Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
made artisans less interested in doing paperwork at night
removed “idle in chair” so that there will be free chairs for people to eat in, ever
Naturalists will form work crews (though labourers assigned to naturalist work crew don’t do anything special yet)
Combat & Military
All work crew filters are disabled when a unit becomes conscripted. Filters are then reset to the default when conscripting a unit.
soldiers do pushups
FIXED: colonists would beat up dead bandits, calling it a “melee counterattack”
Animals, Monsters
balance: made animals less hungry on gamestart
(started on burrowing animals but it’s not player-visible)
Buildings, Zones, Modules, Jobs
FIXED: lag when placing buildings or creating modules.
FIXED: civilization maps now computed correctly
FIXED: Doors now render 1OU above the building footprint as ghosts, so they won’t clip through the building any more.
FIXED: we now check whether we are in the same connected component (or not) as items when using them to fill gameSimRequireGameObject requests (this helps fix the case where individual units go nuts not being able to get to materials)
FIXED: typo in “Make Gunpowder” job
added sounds to airdrop crate
renamed some modules to show clear progression of materials ( eg. stone oven -> iron oven )
added bamboo farming (for timber)
added module damage: after a module is used a number of times it will become damaged and require repair using a random material used to build the module
if a damaged module is used enough, it will become inoperative and require repair before it can be used
FIXED: “not enough logs to build gabions despite having lots of logs” bug
added “walls down” building display mode
FIXED: current building display mode now apply to newly created buildings
Biomes & Terrain
FIXED: bamboo (in the wild) wasn’t using “small” variation
balance: added more timber to tropical biome
balance: reduced clumping of ore nodes in certain jungle biome
Multiplayer / Scripting System
Ownership: objects can now be marked (internally) as being “owned” or “not owned” by a player ( or other group, i.e. bandits )
FIXED: Slowdown with large numbers of characters testing for interrupts, caused by round trips to and from Lua system code
UI/UX
added loading screen.
Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
Added debug messages to try and catch more save game issues
Q and E now rotate the camera left and right
SHIFT-Click now places multiple modules at once.
clicking workshop icons in workshop window now zooms to workshop location
FIXED: work crew panel slowdown, take II (the work crew UI should not slow down the game anymore)
FIXED: colonist panel slowdown (related to above)
FIXED: building grid disappears when switching between two building types
FIXED: “Show all commodities” filter now toggles to “Hide All Commodities” as well
FIXED: UI gets cut off in work party menu switching from all workers to military sometimes
Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
The development progress page has also been updated, with exhaustive notes on the status of the project, as well as more details on the stuff we included above.
Clockwork Empires December update, "The Ghastly Tale of Amon Chalkbracket's Eldritch Transformation!" Now Live
Our December update is now up on Steam! Highlights of today's patch include:
Naturalists will now explore, study nature, and find weird artifacts!
Added Laboratories and Scientists to study weird artifacts & do science!
(Coincidentally) your colonists might transform into (more) monsters if certain conditions are met. Mysterious!
Buildings and Modules can be dismantled: Build, dismantle, then rebuild your colony to be more perfect!
Favours: use your prestige in the Empire to call in supplies, skilled workers, or if you have no prestige: extra criminals! Hooray for Extra Criminals!
The full changelog is really long, but you can find it on the dev blog here.
The development progress page has also been updated, with exhaustive notes on the status of the project.
We wrote about getting from where we are now to where we wanted to be eventually in our high-level designs. Balancing things a bit, reducing some fiddly-ness and putting together some pieces that we have been building separately until now. The full post can be found here:
The full post can be found here:
https://www.gaslampgames.com/2014/12/10/gamifying-synergy-through-delegation-or-more-combat-design/
We talked a long time ago about designing combat for Clockwork Empires, and there were a few things involved in our design that we've carefully been unpacking. The most important thing for us for the combat was the statement: “Combat should be slow, mostly positional, and have its outcome determined by supply and setup instead of tactical micromanagement.”
(Not representative of final game product.)
Which... we've done almost none of so far, BUT we've been setting the pieces in place for proper implementation. "Supplying and setting up" the feature, if you will.
Clockwork Empires November update, "Bandit Attack on 'Fightin' Vicar Zedock Woodburn's Frontier Chapel" Now Live
Our third monthly Steam update is now up! Highlights of today's patch include:
Bandit attacks!
Chapels and Vicars to see to your colonists' spiritual guidance
The Rendering Overhaul of Doom (in preparation for MacOS & Linux support)
Workshops can now be given standing orders to maintain a player-defined number of products in the colony at all times
32b Now Up in Experimental Branch (and a new blog post!)
New blog post up here where Nick discussed a few of the things we've been working on quietly over the last week. Some of them are in the new experiemental branch that's now up! Here's a changelog for the most recent build:
Jobs/Workcrews
FIXED: jobs not being taken if you have a workshop assignment (regardless of whether or not the assignment is being done)
FIXED: two work parties can compete for the same assignment, causing one of them to never take a new assignment
X-to-cancel assignment now (mostly) works in the jobs menu
increased range of player-assigned hunting job
Buildings/Modules
added a Chapel building
added some modules for the chapel (but they don't do anything yet and there's no Vicar)
Characters
FIXED?: various potential scriptErrors in the friend-making process
added more names for workcrews because it /is claimed/ that there are lots of repeat names
balance: turned one labourer into an overseer at game start
balance: adjusted immigration rate of overseers upward
added alerts for various cases of death due to murder, being marked for justice but getting murdered by cultists instead, and being marked for justice but being killed by something else entirely.
cleaned up emotion animation jobs for characters (hooked up a couple more animations, have them attempt an emotion icon if it's been a while since an icon has been displayed)
balance: re-weighted "experience terror" job
balance: re-weighted emotion animations to base utility on emotionalAnimationTimer
added "feel madness" emotion animation job
added a "felt madness" memory (for the "feel madness" job)
lower class labourers made grubbier
Combat/Military
FIXED the thing where landmines/logs wouldn't count down in commodity stats when placing landmines/gabions
added ability to remove landmines & dismantle gabions
explosive commodities will now explode when damaged
incidentally, commodities can be destroyed by damage (we'll see how horribly this pans out)
added ability for hunters to shoot hostiles in combat (eg. Fishpeople)
balance: adjusted civilian melee attacking a bit
new affliction system implemented!
Save/Load
FIXED: stockpile serialization
Fishpeople/Others
Fishpeople can use their urchin grenades!
Fishpeople given simple personality archetypes to affect behaviours
Fishpeople with leadership qualities can rally raiding parties over various issues
lightened up and desaturated the gray fishpeople skin so it's more silver
cleaned up interrupts & job utilities on fishpeople jobs (they were all over the place)
and for Other Things
Engine
FIXED: game now lets you know if the starting scripts are broken
Nature/Animals
new hematite nodes added
Beetle Steaks!
terrain: added some grass to the temperate beach
biome generation adjusted a bit, secretly?
added "plant" tag to grass (for herbivores)
added Land Dragon
added Fox
Events
made immigration event give more game log info
Development Blog Update: Fight or Flight
In the dev blog post for this week, we explore the decisions made by characters when they're under attack, how we're balancing them, and what's involved. The whole post can be found here:
Colonists are fickle creatures. You must take good care of them or they’ll starve to death. Or join a cult and start murdering for Quag’garoth (as one typically does when left without supervision).
What I’m getting at is that we’ve got quite a challenge in making colonists act like little virtual people. Part of how colonists end up acting is up to how the player manages then, as it should be in this business of interactive media. But the larger part of the iceberg (to our perspective) is making this possible to say nothing of engaging in the first place, and that’s up to how we hook up the pipes behind the scenes to enable colonists to express varied, interesting behaviour based on stimuli which can be observed and often manipulated by the player.
We bring you this urgent heliograph message to inform you that Revision 32A has been posted to the Experimental Branch of Steam. It contains a number of high quality crash fixes, and improvements to loading and saving!
Also, apparently, pies.
- FIXED: crash writing empty string to console
- FIXED: crash when a camera target is deleted
- FIXED: crash when a module is interrupted at precisely the last second of construction (this somehow managed to affect three people)
- FIXED: combo box now has correct behaviour in workshop menu
- FIXED: jobs are now correctly deleted from a very large internal table when they are aborted
- FIXED: removed unnecessary sqrt() from Proximity Query code for aurochs
- FIXED: potential errors in fishperson_attack_ranged.fsm (where it checks if target is dead)
- FIXED: potential errors in harvest.fsm
- FIXED: Obeliskians use correct "run" animation
- FIXED: possible scriptError when fishperson attempts to shoot dead target
- added pies & piemaking jobs
- added (placeholder?) NCO replacement event
- added upper class death prestige loss
- balance: lowered obeliskian hitpoints to 2/3rds previous value
- fishpeople and animals can interrupt jobs at 1s intervals
- added icon to hover over frontier justiced colonists
- added checks for potential scriptError in citizen.go (in makeFriendText w/ invalid friend gameobject)
- balance: combat job rebalancing and fixes (Thanks Samut, you're a madman! In the best way.)
- added additional error-checking to fishperson_butcher.fsm
- balance: decreased effect of hunger on "eat food" (as it would easily exceed "run away from murderous fishpeople")
- balance: increased utility of picking up bullets (soldiers would do literally anything but pick up bullets if there was anything else to do)
- stop. added new hammer sounds
- added landmine emote to fishpeople when they become scared of landmines
- slightly increased landmine damage
- added a little more randomness to flee target position
- made fishperson try to get slightly closer to target before using fishgun
- spelling fix: "ruins" -> "runes"
- MOB JUSTICE! (civilians may join in on Frontier Justice if they have certain traits.)
- smelting, distilling, and ceramics jobs now use the queued processing thing
- added some new animal behaviours, mostly involving running away from stuff
Clockwork Empires October update, "Midnight Defence at Skullswamp Arsenal" Now Live
Our second monthly Steam update! Lots of new stuff this patch, including:
A new building placement system (and re-enabled renovation)
Player control over work crew workshop assignment
An ammunition system
Improved combat AI
And stew can now be cooked without having to intently watch it boil!
The development progress page has also been updated, but our web guy is currently lost somewhere in Nevada, so the new version will be posted as soon as we find him.
In light of certain cowardly acts being perpetuated in the so-called "Experimental Branch" by our Empire's militia, and upon the development of new wondrous "UI improvements" for the building designation modes, the Colonial Ministry's head offices wish to inform you that Revision 31D has now been pushed to the Experimental Branch of Clockwork Empires on Steam.
The following changes are to be enjoyed by all Bureaucrats as they go about their daily life in the Colonies:
- module category filters added
- improvements to module placement
- some decor content reactivated (now that we have filters)
- windows work!
- modules given filter tags
- FIXED: combat jobs not interrupting "Respond to Alarm" properly
- FIXED: landmine scriptErrors
- FIXED: clear_object scriptErrors
- rebalanced combat job utility values
- balance: every weapon drop is guaranteed to have one crate of ammunition
- dead things now don't take damage
- removed spam from tree
- improved Eldritch Transformation effects
- "Eldritch Transformation" may no longer interrupt itself
- made "Eat Food" more important to hungry people
Pip pip,
-- Gaslamp Games
Revision 31C now up in Experimental branch
Revision 31C has now been pushed to the *experimental* branch on Steam for those brave souls who would like to try it.
This is a big one.
A Note The current module placement UI is the tip of an iceberg of a large system overhaul for building buildings, placing modules, and revamping the economy in general. There's a lot of infrastructure going in here and the improvements are going to take a while to show themselves, but trust us, it'll be worth it.
The current UI scheme is a placeholder and will be improved. Remember: The experimental branch is for Science and sometimes Science can be a bit rough around the edges, but that's How We Learn.
(Also: the loading bay / roll-up doors are also In The Shop For Repairs.)
You can also find this changelog (and previousl ones) on the Gaslamp forums here: https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/revision-31c-now-up-in-experimental-branch.9689/
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Vaguely Organized Changelog:
Save Games
FIXED: Save games now properly saves rally points (and other beacons)
FIXED: Save games now properly saves filters
FIXED: Save games now properly saves fog of war
FIXED: Save games now properly restores tooltips
Added a message to confirm that a save game is in progress/complete
Command icons now not doubled on new game/load game
Extra windows properly dismissed on game start/load
(And other, deeper, eldritch issues should be fixed; let us know if you have any problems.)
Characters hunting requires bullets; hunters will acquire & use bullets; civilians will drop bullets when not hunting
bullet amount now displayed in civilian text paragraph
cleaned up glitches on pickup and drop ammo animations
FIXED food memories weren't working correctly
balance: made alarm range almost exactly flee range (so you don't get people running from fishpeople without raising alarm)
balance: a first friend is easy to make, every subsequent friends requires double the positive interactions for friendship
items held by characters are dropped when they die
FIXED carried bodies are dropped when people are killed
characters create alarm waypoint via "Raise Alarm" job when a "hostile_entity" is nearby. There's only ever one alarm beacon per hostile_entity ever.
Military/Combat
added an ammunition system
ammo crates hold 100 bullets, remaining bullets displayed in tooltip
characters can hold up to 20 bullets, bullets held displayed in info panel
bullets are needed to fire guns
soldiers without bullets are more likely to flee
civilians will not automatically collect bullets
added alerts for not having bullets
FIXED: corpses can no longer set off landmines
"assemble gabion" job will choose closest logs
some soldier jobs now better modified by health/bullets/morale/civilization proximity
soldiers slightly more into pulling bullets from bullet crates that have already been opened
bullets now drop off dead people if said people have any bullets
FIXED: crate of ammunition was tagged as "pistol" for some reason
landmines now trigger properly on hostile entities
landmines will detonate if enemy is in adjacent tiles
balance: shrapnel does very little damage to objects
added 3 landmines and 3 crates of ammo to gamestart
created "respond to alarm" job that summons soldiers toward "alarm waypoint"
added tooltip to gabion
health is now a factor in whether soldiers choose to fight or flee
made soldiers less likely to attack things on their own (to avoid the 'one guy hunting down fishpeople across the whole map' thing)
made soldiers weighted more to fighting near civilization (see above)
added melee attack jobs for soldiers
overhauled counterattacking (including for civilians)
overhauled weighting of most combat jobs (flee vs. shoot vs. melee vs. counterattack)
added Jezail rifle
made starting military supplies random
Buildings/Agriculture/Economy
Window hole punching now works in buildings
added ability to flatten terrain & flatten terrain job
added Iron Charcoal Kiln / Iron Ceramics Kiln
added Brick Charcoal Kiln / Brick Ceramics Kiln
added Stone Smelting Crucible
added Stone Charcoal Kiln / Stone Ceramics Kiln
added gibs to gabions
added pfx and sfx for destroying crops, gabions
balance: change some crop growth times
removed extra "raw_food" tag on wheat flour
changed industrial_kiln to charcoal_kiln
FIXED: spoiled crops tooltip now says crops are spoiled
added "Make Landmine" job to arsenal
various foliage textures cleaned up
added low-tech brewing vat (w/ unique animations)
gunpowder production moved to Arsenal from Chemist
Cults
cultists have to go to a shrine, pray, and summon a dagger before performing murder (it's now a two stage process)
cultists will now try to use a dagger to murder (rather than an axe)
balance: cultist murder requires more murder points
balance: eldritch transformation will drain cult power
shrines now for real actually get rotated randomly! (seriously!)
Animals
FIXED animals no longer double-inherit ai_damage (now effectively have 2x hitpoints from before)
certain herd herbivores will rampage if attacked (aurochs, giant beetle)
large animals will slowly regen health
player can give orders to hunt particular animals & this will display icon
FIXED: butchering animals and fishpeople can be ordered by click & drag
added rampage and herd rampage ability to certain herd animals (aurochs, giant beetle)
herbivores will graze again
adjusted herbivore wandering
Fishpeople
FIXED: butchering fishpeople at all
fishpeople attack event reports raider # in log
balance: a fishperson will only attack walls a limited number of times (so they breach walls rather than get stuck doing demolition duty)
balance: added randomness to fishpeople choosing to attack objects so they're less singleminded about property destruction
balance: slightly lowered fishperson health
made landmine explosions quite scary to fishpeople in a large radius
Events
added landmines to weapon supply drop
size of supply drops now based on prestige
immigration event gives more feedback via text log
World
foragesource visuals now more consistent
UI
tutorial now pauses the game when tutorial messages appear
added more unique module icons
added some new icons (landmine, special_category, airdrop crate, negative prestige, sulphur lump)
Un-disabled main menu buttons on returning to main menu
