Settlements, Crops and Prisons news - Ultima Ratio Regum

A short update this week – although I’ve returned from Canada and have no intention of going to any other seven-hour jetlag conferences ever again in the near future, it’s taking me a little bit to get back into the swing of coding once more (and I’ve had a lot of doctorate correspondence and the like to catch up on). So this week we just have a few small updates on a few things, and hopefully next week a much larger one again. I think a fair estimate for this release is towards the end of July or the start of August – it is going to take slightly longer than 0.5, but that’s due both to all the travel of the last few months and this being the final start of my doctorate, but it’ll be worth it. Walking around cities even in their early form now gives an impressive sense of the scope and size of the game-world.

Settlement Patterns
I’ve started early drafting work on hunter-gatherer settlements. They all appear as ritualized patterns of building-placement – you might get one which looks like a spiral, as the one below, or any one of several dozen other shapes (which themselves vary between playthroughs, but broadly confirm to a preset archetype). Each will contain some crucial buildings such as a town hall, housing for their chieftain and a shrine (if their religion has outside worship), and then various others like forms of burial (pyres, crypts, graves, excarnation platforms, etc), later probably some enclosures for animals, etc. They have no “shops” as such – those who trade are simply individuals who will do so from their own homes. I’m still deciding if all hunter-gatherer civilizations will have a barter system, or have their own forms of currency (shells, certain types of pebbles, etc) they use instead. I think a mix could be interesting, but we’ll see. Each also has a different form of building construction – some use mud bricks, some wattle and daub, some blocks of ice (if located in tundra), some use thatch, some use stone, and so on. Here’s an example of one possible layout, though so far lacking much detail beyond just standard buildings and one or two special ones near the core:

One thing I struggled with what a distinct thematic role for them compared to cities, towns and nomadic fortresses. I’ve now settled on something I’ll talk about in more detail in a later entry, but it focuses on the historical myths and legends of the world, and giving out particular kinds of information that might only be available from them. As with all other settlements, of course, they will be connected to the world histories – if a historical entry mentions a great cavern beneath the settlement, that cavern will indeed be there…

District Buildings
I’ve started to add special buildings to city districts. This is just a very early example but should give a decent impression. This is a lower-class housing district which has had a prison, an asylum, a graveyard and some slave quarters spawned in it. Naturally each will have a huge number of designs (with some randomized aspects within those designs), and these designs are just a placeholder, but you get the idea. As mentioned before there will also be some rare, unique, larger special buildings that take up the entire district and are world-renowned (“the world’s greatest prison”, etc), which I hope to show off soon. Although I haven’t yet begun work on them, I’ve figured out how I’m going to get upper-class housing districts to spawn, and I have some ideas for docks and making appropriate room for ships to appear and dock in later releases, so I might work on those in the near future.

Development Plan

I’ve updated the development plan (Ultimaratioregum.co.uk). I’ve been thinking for some time about the correct order to do the four releases after this one, and I have settled on what is undoubtedly the most logical sequence based on the dependencies each may have with the other. The next release will focus on building interiors and redoing the interior saving/loading system to make it far more efficient (part of the gradual efficiency-improvement of the overall game as talked about last week); then I’ll be adding NPCs, and then moving onto a release I’m particularly excited about which was basically heavily focus on the strategy layer of the game – currencies, movement on the world map, etc. Depending on how long the NPC release takes (it might be much easier than expected) those might be combined into one. After that, we’ll be onto generating weapons and armour and various other items, and implementing combat for the first time.

CROPS!!!!
On one of my first and most-jetlagged days back I didn’t feel up to any coding, so I threw together the procedural graphics for most of the crops that can show up on farms, and also added fruit to fruit trees. THIS IS CRUCIAL.

Concluding Thoughts

So, things are moving once more, and hopefully will pick up a little bit more speed from here on in. I’m balancing my coding at the moment between settlements and city districts, so it could be either of those next week, or something totally different. From now on I’m not really going to try to predict what I’ll post on next week because, as time and experience has shown us, I basically never get it right.