All posts tagged with "Nicholas Vining: Rogue Architect"

Modules, Interrupts, Memory Leaks

The Road to Early Access basically looks like the Road to El Dorado, except the musical numbers are worse. Right now I am still in a land where I have to actually sit down and do all the stuff I’ve been putting off for the course of the product. Two things that fall into this category are “putting modules in the corner of a building” and “interrupts.” Oh, and “fixing the memory leaks.”

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: "Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations".)

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: “Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations”.)

Putting modules in the corner of a building has been something that, since the start of the project, would blow up the game. There were a number of things causing problems here: first off, the code to actually handle the case of inserting the small “module footer” that forms the foundation of a module was blowing up if you put it in the corner of a map. This has been fixed. Second, when we finished a module’s foundation, we would delete the edges on the floor plan, and merge the leftmost and rightmost edges together. Obviously, this is not the right thing to do if a foundation piece is at the leftmost, or rightmost, edge of a blueprint – you end up collapsing two edges together that are at 90 degrees. So this has been fixed for the outside of modules. The inside of modules still breaks, because there is some funny business going on with how we construct interiors that I have yet to track down – but we’re making progress on long standing issues.

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Dodos, Buildings, and the road to Alpha

Daniel suggested that I should pick out some of the juicier fixes and additions from the change log of our latest internal test build and talk about them; it’s also probably instructive to show some of the feedback. Our internal test build of Clockwork Empires is now on Revision 18. We usually do builds about once a week, but this week we had to do an Old-Timey Dredmor-Style Hotfix for Revision 18 because it introduced a bug where people kept spastically trying to pick up and put down shovels, and so now we are at Revision 18A. Some edited highlights:

  • The dodo is back in again. Yes! It now eats all your crops, but it doesn’t get stuck in a berry bush; additionally, hunting work crews will pick up any weapon that is suitable for them and will then go off and create a hideous, bloody dodo flesh massacre. This leads to enormous piles of dodo corpses lying around, including being found in houses and on the steps of upper class houses. Currently, you cannot do anything with a dodo corpse. (You now receive two Dodo Drumsticks if you butcher the corpse -David)
Dodos: The least dangerous game.

Dodos: The least dangerous game.

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I SMOULDER WITH PROGRAMMER RAGE

Have you ever had one of those weeks where everything seems to go wrong? Work is being done. Oh yes, work is being done. But at every step, we are beset upon by mystery and woe! ARGH.

Loading doors! Mr. Triolo animated them. They are lovely:

Good, well-behaved shutters. (Seen in Maya.)

Good, well-behaved shutters. (Seen in Maya.)

Let’s put them through the same process that we use for importing everything else into the game, la la…

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May Technical Status Update: Building Interiors, Workshops, Outlines, Hidden Work

Things are slowly coming together. Some new developments have occurred in programmer town, and we are delighted to finally show you what we spent the past month-and-a-half doing.

Bluntly, things are coming together at last. People can harvest resources, process them in workshops, and convert them to other resources. People have their own actions as well; if people can’t eat, for instance, they’ll die. Poets still wander the hills, trying to be inspired by things. The noble aurochs plough through the land, and so forth. Want to see a sneak peek? Read on for some new features…

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