Hi,
After our five weeks of weekly patches, it’s time to go for a proper devlog. There will be another patch soon, fixing a few rare bugs found by one of our regulars, but the main focus now is to add more content. The next large update will be smaller in scope than 0.8.5 (not every update can be a 120+ line changelog), but it’s still going to add a few new fun stuff for you to play with. Beside adding & fixing stuff regarding the expedition battle things and new interactive questlines, it will add fire (which can spread), proper growth for wild trees and plants, and a few more weather and nature related things.
Fire
This week, I’ve mostly been playing with fire. If I recall correctly, it was an early development promise too, so one of the few remaining checkboxes is being ticked. I could write 10 paragraphs about fire propagation and how well it’s modeled, but in reality, it seems that starting fires IRL for game development purpose is against the law. I had to make do with an approximation. Here’s a video of the very much “work-in-progress” result:
The video is unedited and a bit too long. Skip to 30 seconds before the end when it gets boring so you can see the new flame-thrower in all it’s glory. The graphical rendering of the fire is still subpar. I will try to find better animations and make better particle systems for it. Don’t hold your breath, it’s not going to be super nice looking either. I’d rather save frames than waste CPU cycles on something over complicated.
Anyway, yes, fire will be a thing. It won’t be a very common thing, though. Stone walls and constructed floors (except wood ones) will keep your relatively safe. And it won’t spread without something that can burn on the tile. It will also add a drawback to the overpowered flamethrowers, balancing them out a bit without making them boring. Heat waves might also cause some trees to catch fire occasionally, and there’s a rare late game event, called “wall of flames” which will be, I reckon, subject of much hate in the future. Oh, and yep, it’s likely that your electric grid might cause a few fires too, maybe 🙂
Rain will of course work against fires, and your settlers will do their best to avoid walking in flames and extinguish them (that, I have yet to implement in the internal build). It’s not out the question that I add more wacky (optional) weather patterns taking advantage of the fire.
There’s also a whole thing about 1st, 2rd, 3rd degree burns that is being added, but I will keep that for the release post.
Nature’s Cycle
You might have wondered why trees keep “staying here” after you razed them. The reality is that every month, more trees will spawn next to existing ones, fully grown, at midnight. It is an old, quickly written “hack” to get that done. It’s time to replace it by something a bit more interesting.
I am going to introduce a relatively simple growth system for bushes, plants and trees. The general idea is to have them grow gradually in a manageable fashion. It should even be possible to have different species of trees growing under different conditions. We could have a desert bound cactus and more generic trees in elsewhere. Same goes for the giant mushrooms in some rare underground biomes. All of that being moddable, of course.
There are performances concerns, with trees in the thousands on some maps, it’s not efficient to have each plant running it’s own individual script. Instead I’ll use a more top down approach with a daily “nature” update, probably placed just before the autosave event to make the update un-noticeable, even on extremely large maps. I’m not really worried, but it’ll need some brainstorming nonetheless. 🙂
Expeditions
Expeditions are in a pretty good place, but there’s always more stuff to do. I will likely add more building/maps for some of the locations which are currently using the fallback default layout. It’s quite time consuming, especially for a feature few people are really using, so it’s something I do gradually. I’ll also try to see if I can reasonably make AI factions run their own expeditions. I mean they technically do, but it’s entirely abstracted. The idea would be to allow you to see potential attacks against your production centers before they happen. And optionally be able to intercept them with your own expeditions.
I’m also in the process of figuring how to balance the manual and the automatic combat methods so they don’t feel like being completely different difficulty levels.
Misc. Stuff
With this version being focused on smaller additions, it’s not going to take nearly as long as for the 0.8.5 release. I will continue to go over the various threads/posts to implement requested features, tweak the UI, etc. By now, you probably know the drill. I’m not going to list every single little thing. 🙂
Anyway, that’s all I have to show for now. More will come soon, alongside another small patch.
Cheers!