Clockwork Empires November Update: HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES AND EXORCISE PEOPLE

We figured out what those Cultists have been building in the woods all this time! Yes it’s-

ce_2015_nov_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

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Major player-facing additions this month

  • Building quality mechanics! Add decor to make your workshops & houses more pleasant (or don’t!)
  • Revamped military AI! Soldiers will consistantly rally and follow orders with our newer, stronger AI infrastructure
  • Haunting Spectres! They’re spooky.
  • Additional opportunities for madness and the occult!
  • Point lights! Bring some cheer to those dark, creepy nights.
  • Enhanced murder.
  • Character memories have been cleaned up, extended, and given a longer-term record in the character UI.
  • (Continuing work on Secret Things, deep and dark.)

Alpha 45 Full Changelog (non-annotated, for annotated version go here)

Engine, misc

  • FIXED: OS X crashes when cancelling assignment via assignment beacon
  • FIXED: OS X crashes when crops are finished being harvested
  • FIXED: some leaking memory (what a mess!)
  • replaced dynamic allocations for moving tags about in the game space dictionary with a static pool of memory and a large buffer
  • replaced dynamic allocations of particle system VBOs and memory during the render frame with a pool of VBO resources to draw from; eliminates a memory leak and General Badness with drivers that do not like you creating/deleting VBOs on the fly all that much, and should also provide a modest speed increase.

Save/Load

  • FIXED: Display of work schedule data is no longer reset on load.
  • FIXED: environmental light values now set correctly after save/load

Combat AI / Decision Tree

  • added a bunch more code to the decision tree parser, specifically “enough code to make it work” and “enough code to unbreak the editor.”
  • replaced all old military logic with military decision tree code (it is smarter! also: should fix rallying)
  • FIXED: require_work_party_rally_point not firing consistently

Renderer / Lighting Rewrite

  • added dynamic point lights! they can be attached to a model placer for rigid body and skeletal models
  • lights can now be attached to/removed from placers; UPM version 2.9 created
  • the renderer now applies interior ambient lighting for objects inside buildings, and tracks it on the interior
  • renderer now does lighting in a completely different way for the two existing lights, but this will probably be invisible to the user. It is, however, necessary for everything else.
  • things can now cast shadows on farms (and other decal-type zones)
  • increased transparency of semi-transparent building walls.

Spectres 

  • added Haunting Spectres
  • added Vengeful Spectres
  • added job for Vicar to confront spectre (+ticker message is created when vicar confronts spectre)
  • added spectre report event (spectres can be reported once per night)

Building Quality / Workshops

  • added Building Quality system! You will now have to balance the ratio of work modules to decor in your buildings. Nicer buildings mean happier colonists!
  • and added building quality display on UI for workshops/houses
  • buildings now robustly track modules they contain.
  • added 14 new decor modules
  • appropriate decor has been added to all buildings’ default module lists
  • many modules have been renamed
  • many modules have new descriptions
  • performed reorganization of our workshop edb to be actually legible
  • added icons for mounted aurochs/rhino heads
  • balance: build costs on all decor have been adjusted
  • FIXED: orientation/placement on a number of previously unused models
  • FIXED: script error when building clotheslines
  • FIXED: issue w/ some decor modules not deconstructing correctly
  • FIXED: footprint size on carpets

Madness

  • balance: added various eldritch means which help sustain madness levels
  • added evil book prop
  • added madness sustaining memory creation for colonists w/ cult_seed tag
  • added madness-sustaining effect for colonists w/ occult_mark_black_magic
  • made vermin corpses last longer to encourage Beetle Curses
  • Increased weighting on many madness jobs
  • balance: contact with Obeliskians made slightly more maddening & for longer (due to rarity)
  • FIXED: rare scripterror when attempting to spawn eldritch artifact

Cults

  • added ability to order shrines destroyed
  • added attack_object_until_destroyed.fsm
  • cultists will become upset if your order shrines destroyed, especially at whoever destroyed the shrine
  • balance: slightly increased chance to perform cult recruitment
  • added cultist madness-sustaining memories + new icons for some of them
  • balance: many more experiences can now trigger “cult seed” depending on character traits
  • balance: more strange/terrible events may now provoke cult formation
  • FIXED: possible error cases when cultist leader dies
  • FIXED: cult leadership now transitions correctly when leader dies
  • FIXED: cult group ending due to lack of sufficiently enthusiastic leadership scripterror
  • FIXED: cultist preaching was pushing memory to wrong party in conversation

Offices (Chapel, Pub, Barber)

  • Pub jobs cleaned up to be vastly more efficient at actually stocking and serving drinks
  • Barber/Pub/Chapel: if a colonist seeks treatment/confession/a pint of beer and can’t find a barber/vicar/pub worker nearby, they will abort waiting and create an alert
  • cleaned up confession fsm to not be a huge mess, and thus
  • FIXED: vicars giving confession will no longer permanently paralyze colonists

Religion

  • colonists will now pray at wall shrines
  • added access point to wall shrines
  • made praying at wall shrines something both Spiritually Inclined and Staunch Traditionalists can do

Murder

  • made significant improvements to how colonists decide to engage in murder
  • added Beetle Curse (murder)
  • added Tree Curse (murder)
  • added Occult Murder witnessed event
  • killing someone for the first time will now record their name in the memory
  • cleaned up memories for killing and killing memory creation
  • FIXED: murder due to hunger

Death

  • balance: corpses will only spawn vermin after being left out for a day
  • made a ForceDropEverything receiver in ai_agent.go which drops every damn thing being held; all agents now call this upon death
  • as such, removed a bunch of extra ForceDropTools calls from all the agent scripts
  • therefore FIXED: commodity drops upon character death
  • corpses will now only reset their burial job at sunrise rather than every 10 seconds (it was spammy)

Memories & Character

  • can now query LEQ or GEQ on happy, sad, angry, fearful (for internal scripting)
  • did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go
  • cleanup: moved creation of building quality memories into citizen.go
  • cleaned up defs for bunch of data back-end for memory events
  • balance: tweaked many some memory descriptions & values
  • did an audit of all memory icons and changed/updated/fixed where necessary
  • memories will now use greater range in icons
  • re-added conscription/de-conscription memories
  • cleaned up more food memories
  • cleaned up immigrant & bandit seed memories
  • re-jiggered all damage/murder memories & frontier justicing & murder witnessing
  • reworked food memory creation to more cleanly use makeMemory function
  • did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go; changed lots of previously hardcoded memory values to read from histories.edb
  • cleanup: removed a bunch of memory creation / justice tagging from ai_damage.go and put it in citizen.go where it belongs
  • FIXED: minor starvation scripterror in citizen.go
  • FIXED: some memories were not being triggered correctly
  • FIXED: some more broken memory creation logic
  • FIXED: some broken memory icons
  • FIXED: some broken icons in thoughticons.xml

UI Misc

  • removed all UI filters for military crews except for hunting (Hauling is not a suitable job for the brave troops of Her Majesty’s 40th Civil Engineering Brigade)
  • re-added friendship ticker notification
  • stockpile UI edited for better usability
  • added new code hooks for building UI windows
  • new Office UI code refactored to apply generally to all buildings
  • did framework code for skill progression info on character.
  • did fixes to various minor bugs in UI element sizing
  • did fix to tooltip searching in UI code
  • did fixes to icon -> tag lookup table
  • made gabions log warning refer to “logs” rather than “timber” and say it may be a range problem
  • polished up some icons, added some other new icons. Just a good bunch of icons.
  • FIXED: was possible to order dissection of an Obeliskians more than once on the same specimen
  • FIXED: various crashes in character info panel, hopefully without breaking anything
  • FIXED: various broken icons

Typos

  • fixed various event typos
  • fixed typo in memories
  • FIXED: various typos & grammar (farm text, immigration event)
  • FIXED: various typos

Events, MISC

  • audited and improved spawn locations for all fishperson events
  • added one-time bailout event if you have more workers than you can allocate to all of your overseers
  • below 3 chars bailout only gives overseers now and is somewhat rewritten
  • some events have been given more detailed descriptions for number of ai agents involved
  • doubled timeout length for all events
  • updated job filters tutorial
  • contextual tutorials will no longer fire if the main tutorial is still going
  • balance: reduced max bandits that major bandit attack can send
  • FIXED: scripterror in certain decision case of “Colonists Denounce Cowardice Vs Bandits”

MISC

  • Small code cleanup to Colonists Denounce Cowardice
  • increased log search range for half-size gabions (it was super low)
  • hunger incrementing moved to evening instead of night
  • balance: fishpeople made less likely to turn murderous when intimidated by soldiers
  • FIXED: aborting a “Gather Building Materials” job due to an explosive injury would put the job in the wrong assignment, causing it to be completed infinitely
  • FIXED: “isObjectInRadiusWithTagReverseMustOwnTwoTags” function never checked the second tag

????

  • added Grape Vine crop (commented out)
  • added Wine commodity & production (commented out)
  • drew grapes + wine icons, attached to commodities (commented out)
  • re-added poetic memories to use hearExclamation (Poets just don’t spawn right now)
  • cleaned up some junk code from bandit.go
  • started some defs for Obeliskian tech/commodities
  • adding infrastructure for obeliskian forge (not fully implemented)
  • added Nicholas’s new Arcane Symbols to the documentation on spacial maps (I have no idea what this means)

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong!

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2 Comments

2 Responses to “Clockwork Empires November Update: HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES AND EXORCISE PEOPLE”

  1. Jons says:

    Hello. I’m sure this question has been asked before, so I apologize in advance: Will there ever be an option to enable edge-panning in Clockwork Empires? Not being able to edge-pan seriously hinders my enjoyment of this game and I really want to enjoy it with all my might.
    Cheers,
    Jons

    { reply }
    • ShadowTani says:

      The game options could indeed need a bit of love. Other options that would be quite delightful could for example be to 1.) chose if you want stockpiles to always start with all options enabled or disabled; as well as 2.) if you want new colonists to be auto-distributed or not.

      { reply }

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