SP Native [WB] Blood and Steel 2.0

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May i suggest making uprgade of villages similar to M2TW. I mean let the player choose between Castle and Town which would have different benefits. Like castle having more professional troops to hire and cheaper/free upkeep of garisson, while towns would bring more income and have more varied stock of goods. And when the time comes you can turn castle into town and vice versa.
 
We'll see how that evolves over time.  Right now, I'm still dealing with some Struggle Bus stuff, clearing out the remaining old code in game_start that can now be safely pruned away, writing the procedural system that will make each start a little different, etc. :smile:
 
Ah... victory!

game_start is cleaned up, and the stage is set for finally doing something about that map I promised a while ago  :lol:

module_scripts.py is down to 13,539 lines of code (down from 47,651 in Native, i.e., it's less than a third) with some room for possible improvement. 

mission_templates is the last major area where giant amounts of cleanup are still possible, I think; there's a bunch of junk there that I haven't dared remove just yet, but soon... soon.  Mission Templates were left to last, largely because I want to write a really clean system, building on the already-pretty-clean systems that I know are battle-tested, efficient and very good (imho).  What I'm going to do there really depends on how I'm feeling about



Hey, I know if you're not a coder, who cares, where's some gameplay news?

Well... I've gotten the Lords removed, the Kingdoms are rationalized, the town menu Just works, players can go on adventures just by visiting the Tavern... and everything's basically ready for the next stage of development:  setting up the strategic AI for the Kingdoms, so that they do semi-rational things (like capture villages, build improvements, and so forth).  I'm not promising to build a brilliant AI; this is going to use a pretty simple system initially, so the behaviors are totally expected.

Once that's done and I've got the Mission Templates cleaned up, it's a (relatively) short way from there to the first playable Alpha.
 
You mean, like some sort of procedural quest thing?

IDK... maybe.  I'd honestly like to have some sort of basic FedEx Quest stuff, at least.  First, though, the framework needs to all Just Work, so that we can invade our first villages, find adventures, fight enemies, and so forth.
 
xenoargh said:
You mean, like some sort of procedural quest thing?

IDK... maybe.  I'd honestly like to have some sort of basic FedEx Quest stuff, at least.  First, though, the framework needs to all Just Work, so that we can invade our first villages, find adventures, fight enemies, and so forth.

Just finishing the Todd Howard Trinity.
 
Hah, yeah, well, we'll see.  At this time, what we've got is basically Native, with a few new features (and a few features removed) but running with about 1/3rd of the code :iamamoron:

Everything from Caravans, Farmers, Bandits to Patrols, etc. is included in the mix (replacing thousands of lines of code handling all that stuff in Native).  I've written a pretty cool piece of code that auto-populates the world over time or when entering / exiting a location, so that things don't feel too empty, while keeping it very very efficient, so that framerates and memory use on the strategic map are both really low.

The strategic AI's going to be (comparatively) easy; it'll basically run each little kingdom, directing it to take over the nearest neutral locations, then make war on each other over time.  Unlike the last iteration of Blood and Steel, it won't be a huge constant bloodbath from the start; instead, the procedural elements should mean the player has some time to take over neutral locations and start up their own empire, if they move fast.

Once that's written and works, at least after a fashion, I'll probably move on to dealing with the specific issues with the endgame stuff that never got more than half-baked last time.  I may want to take a pause, though, to work on finishing the strategic map first.  Or deal with the artwork stuff that needs doing to take this to the place it needs to get to; I need a lot of new things built for scenery, etc. eventually.
 
xenoargh said:
Hah, yeah, well, we'll see.  At this time, what we've got is basically Native, with a few new features (and a few features removed) but running with about 1/3rd of the code :iamamoron:

Everything from Caravans, Farmers, Bandits to Patrols, etc. is included in the mix (replacing thousands of lines of code handling all that stuff in Native).  I've written a pretty cool piece of code that auto-populates the world over time or when entering / exiting a location, so that things don't feel too empty, while keeping it very very efficient, so that framerates and memory use on the strategic map are both really low.

The strategic AI's going to be (comparatively) easy; it'll basically run each little kingdom, directing it to take over the nearest neutral locations, then make war on each other over time.  Unlike the last iteration of Blood and Steel, it won't be a huge constant bloodbath from the start; instead, the procedural elements should mean the player has some time to take over neutral locations and start up their own empire, if they move fast.

Once that's written and works, at least after a fashion, I'll probably move on to dealing with the specific issues with the endgame stuff that never got more than half-baked last time.  I may want to take a pause, though, to work on finishing the strategic map first.  Or deal with the artwork stuff that needs doing to take this to the place it needs to get to; I need a lot of new things built for scenery, etc. eventually.

Great work. Do we have any chance to get your super-cleaned-up Native module_system version at some point btw? ?
 
Of course!  It'll be available with every Alpha release.  Honestly, I should probably set up a Git for this, so that the public can do pulls and forks as I go... but I'm too lazy :roll:

Granted, that might will mean it has a few unresolved bugs, so it might be wiser to wait until Beta, but yeah, the source will be available.
 
Thanks a lot again for the confirmation. I'm one of the few waiting for your template :smile: Perhaps Git is a good way to go, when you have the time for it.



One of the things I usually add in any of the mods I work on is your changes to town walkers

You mentioned something about using `tick` to add crowd ambience, but never followed up on it :smile: I wonder if you'd be adding that to 2.0? :smile:

Thanks again!

 
Perhaps, when it's a little more ship-shape. 

Please do remember, right now, it's Very Very Alpha, probably contains some truly bad bugs that I just haven't seen yet because I haven't tested certain things properly... and to really provide a complete kit, I'd have to also build some infrastructure; I don't normally have all the resources (textures, BRFs, etc., etc.) available to do a proper, complete build of the project, without setting up a lot of things. 

But a basic source-code repo, perhaps, so long as people understood that it's still subject to quite-violent change for some time to come.
 
First build of what I think just might be the official map is done.  The art side of this is not; that will take a while.  But I roughed out the concept and, what do ya know, it actually works.

I'm actually pretty stoked; it didn't crash or do anything else that was horrible, which is a first for me :lol:

So, what to expect?

1.  It's smaller than Native, and there are fewer towns, etc.  Why?  Because, frankly, the vastness in Native never really sold me; I want a game where I'm getting to the action pretty quickly and where wars play out in times less-resembling glacial epochs.  Think around half the size of Native's map in playable area, total.  It'll still take a looooong time to conquer every single place on the map, but it doesn't have vast empty stretches and there's always a town somewhere nearby, waiting for you to head in with loot and captives to sell off.

2.  It's very much broken into distinct zones and doesn't pretend to be Europe, kinda.  Instead, a lot of thought was put into making each zone feel pretty distinctive and hopefully, fresh, once the artwork gets there.

3.  It's specifically balanced so that none of the AI factions gets a huge advantage at the start.  No more "Swadia gets hosed", etc.- I am building a game and I don't care if the geography reflects even a shadow-version of Europe, and it should be something where a player can start in any of the major cities and feel like they've got a shot, rather than pushing the player to starting off (or rushing to) a specific area (to farm Huscarls, for example).
 
On the town_walkers question... maybe? 

Basically, what I was saying there was that the tick function could've added a lot of dynamism by causing behaviors to apparently change over time; you'd just iterate through the Agents and set up new state stuff so that they'd have a little more variety, change their behavioral dynamics, or play special animations.  Never enough time for that; I'm not much of an animator and putting huge time into wandering in Town Centers, which I hardly ever did, didn't seem productive.

I certainly am hoping to do something interesting with the Taverns, though, which might be of interest.  I'm considering turning them into the Town Center concept that never really worked well in Native (imho). 

I feel like Taverns should be a bit like the experience players had in Borderlands; everything you actually need (buy / sell, get adventures, etc.) is in one place that's visually interesting, makes sense (i.e., you can figure it out on a first play very easily, without a lot of instructions) and is not so large, physically, that you feel like your time's getting deliberately wasted, just selling off your loot (I really, really, really hate games where I have to do a Walking Simulator for 20 minutes to sell something because some lame shopkeeper won't buy my <special thing>). 

If I can make that compelling, I may even get rid of the Town quick-menu system (or at least reduce it to a sell-my-stuff system where they can just one-shot-and-done with the Tavernkeeper if they're just raising cash, rather than once into a separate Menu and then into the Tavern and then, finally, into a Dialog to sell captives, which is cumbersome / awkward).  That'd be really nice, honestly; I don't mind visiting the Tavern, because it's nice and small (well, except for the ones where we have to climb stairs and such; those are awkward) but I really do mind if the game starts wasting my time, as a player.

But first, the map and the strategic AI issues need to get hashed out; can't really have a sandbox game where it's all static and boring unless the player does something, can we...
 
Meanwhile... not done yet, but...

BS_maptest001.jpg

...hoping it's done in the next couple of days.  Biggest texturemap I've ever painted, and a lot of technical challenges.
 
Well... I'll be darned, it's going to work  :lol:

BS_maptest003.jpg


Still a bunch of work to do, but... yeah, the basic concept's sound. 

[EDIT]Yes, the mountains need some work.  No worries, they'll get done this afternoon.[/EDIT]
 
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