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Archives (read only) => Mandate Engine => Topic started by: MoLAoS on 2 September 2012, 03:39:38

Title: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 2 September 2012, 03:39:38
I decided to just make one thread about my fork and not post new threads but mainly just update this one:

Videos:
Mandate related supply chain example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZe2R0LGQJY&feature=g-upl
Mandate related item system demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoHTr4m37Bs&feature=youtu.be

My blog is available at my website at:
www.lordofthedawn.com/wp

SourceForge page, not super useful yet:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mandateengine/

GitHub Page, also not incredibly useful, does have copy of master branch:
https://github.com/MoLAoS/Mandate

The website is not currently in serious use and mostly dealt with two of my previous projects. The blog is updated daily or weekly depending on my mood.

List of previously added features:
(click to show/hide)

Partially Completed:
(click to show/hide)

Semi-Complete List Of Intended Features:
(click to show/hide)

September 1st:
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September 20th:
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Update on Majesty stuff:
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September 27th, 2012
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Edit:
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Faction Build Progress, September 30:
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Item Creation, Process Integration, Storage, Commands
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Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 17 October 2012, 16:27:58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoHTr4m37Bs&feature=youtu.be

New video showing me equipping items to a  warrior. Items can be produced on a timer as well as with the command. They currently provide enhancements only but I am finishing up resistances/damagetypes, item/resource/unit creation on a timer and also cost and storage modifications.

I am a little behind schedule for Majesty because I spent a day fixing the video thing, had to change something so that the game wouldn't crash if you tried to end it, although quitting the whole program was fine, items took a bit longer to handle than I planned and also various real life distractions and a bit of ennui I had to beat.

I am finishing the getLongDesc() function for items, basically the same as the unit one describing all its properties in a tool tip, I am getting as I said before the rest of the item bonuses working, and that will take me probably till Friday morning or night.

Then I will be ready to institute the final part of the game logic for the demo, the Majesty like AI where units will operate at the agent level to do tasks like buy items, build structures, and fight enemies. Although I wasn't programming a lot this past week I did a lot of thinking and planning, so I know exactly how I want to set up the AI.

Most of the item work is done, still need to finish unequip button functions. Got resource/unit/item gen and resource/item processes done. Still need to hook up stuff like resistances/damage bonuses.

I had to entirely rework the item system first because I needed pointers to make the aforementioned generation/process stuff to work properly with timers and then because pointers messed up other things, but its all back to working now.

Work on both the engine itself and my Majesty-like demo proceeds well. Next up, agent level AI and then some GUI polish so the average user can understand what all the new buttons/icons do.

Edit:
resistance and damage type modification by items is now working properly.
this will also help me i think in getting the old load bonus system to function properly.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread (Majesty-like)
Post by: MoLAoS on 26 October 2012, 05:18:06
I was somewhat distracted last week due to my mother going through a lot of issue with her broken ankle/separated ankle bones and her series of 3, so far, casts, as well as the Cardinals in the NLCS, my home team, and the Tigers in the ALCS and World series, my father lived 40 years in Detroit, as well as some other issues.

As such I know I am somewhat behind my schedule for the release of my Majesty-like demo. I have managed to spend almost all day today and yesterday on it and I will be spending about 20 hours over the next two days as well. I was delayed somewhat while coding due to some idiosyncratic stuff in the GAE map/travel code which I have now resolved. I have almost got the exploring behavior finished and that experience will significantly speed up my work on the hunting and raiding behavior as well as the collecting and purchasing behavior.

I was forced to clear the map of all obstructions to clear up some obfuscating factors about the pathfinding/map code, and I think I will leave it that way in the foreseeable future since its actually true to traditional Majesty maps. This may change far down the road when the mainline new AI is done, but that's like 6 months minimum away.

Currently I have units moving around the map uncovering unexplored lands as well as various guild unit limits without requiring resource based limits and also the item system is functioning properly and post AI-Item integration, basically its only set up currently for player controlled item equips/unequips, it is ready for use as a unit based as opposed to unit type based enhancement.

I am introducing a few twists, for both creative and legal reasons, on the Majesty style game play, which further delays the release but makes the game more interesting, at least in my personal opinion.

In normal Majesty you create guilds with an increasing price per guild built, with no cap excepting that costs and gold totals are limited to 2million gold, with 4 units per guild. Guilds add spells to your spell book ai element, spells are global for temples and local for wizards, while various guilds have special abilities. You only need to upgrade one guild to get abilities.

I as part of my over all campaign to reduce urban sprawl in base builders and also be more realistic, have changed some of this. Guilds can be built, with more expensive base costs, but they get more upgrades. Size upgrades provide more heroes per guild, with the cap based on the hero type.

Each guild type has a mother house which determines the upgrades in capability that that guild can research. Mother house upgrades are quite expensive but they provide research capabilities to all guild branches. Mother houses are built from the faction menu, branches are built from the mother house. Mother houses contain research into new spells or production capabilities and you also need to equip them with facilities. Branch guilds require only facilities to produce anything researched at the mother house.

Guilds possess multiple kinds of mother houses, however branches are cheaper and more efficient to buy than new mother houses, a mother house represents a significant investment and which mother house you pick from each guild type determines your capabilities. It is possible to create multiple mother houses per guild type, however mother houses and their bonuses aren't cheap, and there may be a distance limit so you have to locate different mother houses far away from each other. Branch vs mother house costs mean you want to build many branches of a mother house, well like 3 or 4 to make the costs break even over the hero count, and also upgrade the habitation space of the mother house and each branch in order to make the investment in larger and more valuable mother houses worth it.

Also each guild has vastly different specialties like damage types and behaviors and support/buff skills, so you are better off in most cases going for a new mother house of a guild of an entirely different kind, rather than trying to get all the mother houses of the same guild type.

So having a priestly order, a warrior order, a mage order, and a ranger order is generally better than having 3 mage orders for versatility purposes.

In general there will be many more kinds of units, structures, and items than in the original Majesty. There are more hero types, plus you need to count the varied orders for each type, and possibly even tiers of units per order, for instance the high priestess or archmage may live in the mother house along with subordinates, whereas regular branches have only a high mage and then mages in the lower ranks.

You will also see various structures, an clothier for mages and priests, a tanner for rangers and rogues, and an armorer/blacksmith for warriors and paladins and knights. You will also have enchanters, crafters, alchemists, jewelers and other such things, which Majesty kept at the market, bazaar, and wizards guild.

/wall of text
Title: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 5 November 2012, 04:34:08
This thread will contain any new information about the new game type I am working on getting a solid demo of to show off the new capabilities of my Glest fork.
I'm gonna grab some posts from the main mandate thread and reformat it for this post in the interests of completeness.
This will be the first serious demonstration of new gameplay capabilities, although it lacks any major engine updates.
This is just one of the kinds of totally different game types you can work with, in whole or in part, using Mandate.

Thanks to fabulous number of solid quality models I am one my way to finishing the units for the player faction.

I added a new command that allows buildings to produce structures without a moveskill as if you were using the faction build menu. Except this command properly displays the selected model when placing. I learned enough about why the faction menu only displays the icon and not the model to probably fix that issue later on, which is quite nice.

I am working my way through the guildhalls and mother houses and their resident heroes, 12 of each for 36 units in all, so its taking quite a while. First I supplied basic XMLs with build idle and die, then i added a structure(the modified build command), produce, load, and unload skill and command.

Each guildhall can produce load and unload its heroes and motherhouses at this stage can do all of that and create guildhalls.

Mother houses forts and shops are built from the faction build menu, currently 12 mother houses and 1 for and 5 shops can be built from the menu and properly display build and die in game although they have the default stats which will need to be modified.

Guildhalls are build only from the mother house, firstly to reduce massive clutter of icons on the build menu and secondly to avoid me having to add annoying unit requirements so you can only build them after building the mother house.

Each mother house/guild hall pair comes from the same faction, except wizards, so as to look more cohesive. That system also minimizes art style conflicts since the two buildings match and different guilds each have different styles.

Currently I am using buildings from the elves, dwarves, romans, greeks, magic, tech, undead, moon, imperial and woodsmen factions.

Dark magic is too evil, as are some undead, so they will be used in the demon/monster faction instead. Warlords clashes with the fantasy vibe somewhat, while imperial I only used the keep/castle as an upgrade for the tech castle building. There may be further use of tech and imperial structures with some sort of steampunk related guilds.

Mother houses will eventually provide higher tier heroes beyond the basic hero as well as upgrades. They may also produce an item that the hero will buy if he has money which will allow the use of advanced skills. You would only need one mother house, which is good since they are quite expensive. Guildhalls merely provide extra hero spaces. Both mother houses and guild halls will have space upgrades to load/produce extra heroes.

I will probably need another few days to add the attack skills and then balance unit stats once I finish the basic functions and select models for the heroes, the guildhalls/motherhouses all have models and can be built but not all of them have their commands.

Items/upgrades and the various shops which also sell items will take me maybe 1 or 2 days.
Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 5 November 2012, 06:58:12
Reserved for small updates:

Giant Update(November 22nd):
(click to show/hide)

Units Owned Bug Resolved(November 6th):
(click to show/hide)

Small AI Issue Resolved(November 6th):
(click to show/hide)

Got All Units/Buildings Working(November 4th):
(click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 8 November 2012, 05:31:22
Quote from: Psychedelic_hands on  8 November 2012, 05:08:24
Sounds good. Maybe I missed some threads, but how does the gameplay work? Simple explanation please  ;). Also it is sounding mighty complex, are old glest tech-trees still compatible?

The game I am currently working on is similar to games like Majesty 1 and also somewhat similar to some city simulators.

Effectively you can make buildings, some of which produce items and some which make hero units who can buy those items with wealth gathered from killing monsters. Units are controlled by AI but buildings are under player control.

Building commands mostly involve hiring heroes or adding production facilities. Facilities is basically creating and equipping an item that then allows the building to produce new items which heroes automatically buy if they have money and desire.

Heroes get taxed on money they make at their guild which goes into the guild vault. Shops get gold from heroes buying items. This gold is collected by tax collectors. Some structures produce gold automatically as well like markets and houses.

This is all data based though. If you really wanted you could do something like have heroes collect monster parts and plants and sell them to the alchemist who then makes potions and sells them back. Or mages collect magic crystals from lairs which are then stored in the guild and made into items or upgrades or w/e.

This is just one game I decided I wanted to make using the new capabilities of my GAE fork. My fork should play any GAE mod, well there may be some slight updates you would need to make to an old mod's tech tree. I have been attempting to make most changes use optional child nodes but some don't. That's just an xml problem though.
Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 10 November 2012, 23:00:26
For various reasons I couldn't get a lot of work done in the past 3 days, no matter how hard I tried. But I'm back on it now. Mostly doing XML work right now.

Currently I am doing some slight item system modification to make some bugs in the item system, that I noticed when I tried to use the XML, go away. Pretty much done.

I am adding the items to the guilds for things like increased hero housing, new abilities, weapon poisoning and enchanting and what not.

I was thinking of adding a check in the engine to see if its a faction with sim AI so that when you buy an item it equips automatically since there isn't a case where you would make one and not want it to equip in this game type.

Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 November 2012, 00:11:00
Okay I had some medical issues and my computer kept crashing because its really old.

I have just finished enabling the modification system which will allow buildings to give individual upgrades to units/items of the appropriate type. These possess, optionally, an enhancement, one or more resistance boosts, and one or more damage type boosts. You can also add any number of effects.

You specify modifications like items or units with a folder and an Xml file in the modifications folder. Modifications are saved to the faction type, and they are given to units/buildings to distribute using just the name. So if a mage guild passes out various enchantments you would do something like:

<modifications>
    <modification name="flame_weapon"/>
    <modification name="frost_weapon"/>
    <modification name="stone_weapon"/>
</modifications>

But the actual modification information would be in another file. This has 2 goals. Myself and maybe others may want to specify the same modification to be given out by multiple units. Some of my games require this.

The second reason which is likely more important to the average modder with a less complex game is that it clears a lot of extra lines from the unit XMLs which are massively overcrowded already.

This will be used in this particular game to add over time poison damage or paralyzing poison or burning damage to weapons, these upgrades can be purchased at guilds or shops.

This should be the last major code addition for me to have enabled all the necessary features.

Its all XML from here so the alpha version of the game, because of lack of balance and small number of enemy units, should be out in a week or so.
Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 19 November 2012, 10:11:02
Got another butt load of work done. Added the cost application to building from the faction menu. Added some new units and new goals for the AI for some of those new units. Added quite a bit of the gameplay programming.

I ended up making the economy much more complex than Majesty, sort of a hybrid with a city builder.

I still have to add some actual harvested resource types. There will be harvesting for various plants/herbs to create potions. Players will have to locate and defend these plant gathering areas and build a harvest type structure.

There may be some other things like rare metals that will allow production of superior weapons as well. I might make the majority of top tier items require resource collection.

I decided that every guild would have both private and public modifications available and perhaps items as well.

The market not only produces gold on a timer but can build shops which add bonus gold. Shops require various structures like farms and herbalists to build.

Houses cost gold to make and produce population as a static resource. Every other building requires population to build. Houses are built by player decision. Houses also have a householder who repairs the house. Peasants only build houses, they do not repair them in order to allow them to focus on more important tasks. Householders also go out to but things for the house if its fully repaired, this increases the tax collection of the house. They might purchase food from a farm for instance or other materials.

I added several guilds to the game. Guilds also produce goods for householders to purchase, and they allow for new shops in the market. Guilds come with their own set of guards that only protect the guild and they can also buy items which add to taxes. Guilds have workers to make purchases but they don't have their own builders, the castle peasants repair them just like hero guilds.

I am thinking of maybe having all structures have their own repair workers, but im not sure, and its somewhat overpowered, unless they simply have a weak repair rate.

I did intend to have guild motherhouses able to produce special heroes that regular cheaper guilds can't. High priests or commanders of knightly orders and what not. Motherhouses may also have guards.

I decided not to implement global spells from guilds or command flags. So the game is a bit more sim like than Majesty. However some guild upgrades may provide very long range spells that perform spells automatically like heals. Although the engine will eventually have revive powers I decided not to implement any resurrection for the kingdom sim. However, monsters retain gold and possibly items from heroes they kill. Only gold retention is implemented currently.

Quite a lot of what I would like to do is limited by lack of models, ie several types of farms, as well as not wanting to many units in the player faction due to load times and video memory caps. I will see how I can work that out.

I decided to release in December, possibly on or near Christmas, I made a priority list of units and features, I have the major work done, so I can just cut out some of the feature creep if I don't think I'll be ready.

I wouldn't expect Annex level balance among choices, although as a single player game its not too critical. If enough people play and provide feedback that would help.
Title: Re: Mandate Engine Stuff
Post by: MoLAoS on 24 November 2012, 23:45:38
Yet another edit:
The code changes are finally working although its gonna be a huge pain to reformat my 75 unit XML files. I blew an extra 6 hours on it because I was a dumbass and didn't realize that the problem was a pointer value set to 0. Spent so much time changing classes and messing around before I noticed.

Edit: Whoops changed my mind. I changed the loading code since I was trying to allow items to hold commands which they then pass to units that equip them. I wanted to remove a lot of work also and remove duplicate code. So item type and unit type inherit from creatable type now which changes the loading XML a little bit. On the plus side upgrades and maybe some other classes will also inherit from this class and gain its capabilities as well. Even effects/emanations might be able to inherit from this class. Should open up some fun possibilities.

I've fleshed out various aspects of the item and unit system while working on my current game project.

At the point at which I release the game I am working on I will consider the engine to be in its final Alpha stage.
The reason that it will still be Alpha is that it won't contain the new Rocket GUI or the upgraded graphics engine.

Just as a note the final Alpha will be the last version to maintain legacy syntax. Most GAE mods are quite old and no one uses it much because the plebs only care about multi player. It takes a lot of extra work to maintain all the outdated loading syntax. I'll be moving a bunch of stuff around and adding documentation to the code and shrinking the number of lines per file. The unit file has something like 3500 lines of code and growing for instance. Also a lot of the unit type and unit code is duplicated in the item type and item code, so I'll be moving that to another file.

Basically the old upgrade and enhancement and level syntax will all be gone. Aside from the removal of legacy loading code all the new stats and features are optional in the XML.

I play a lot of games for play testing purposes, so most of the changes don't have bug problems. However I wouldn't go so far as to call it a stable release. You definitely cannot use even GAE's rudimentary multiplayer. Mandate won't support multiplayer at any point as far as I am concerned. If I wanted that I would play Starcraft 2.

December 25 is the release date for the semi stable engine release and the game release. Of course the source code is all available at the GitHub page at any time. I usually update it 3-5 times a week from my local repo.
Title: Re: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator Updates
Post by: MoLAoS on 28 November 2012, 12:46:41
I've gotten all the units onto the new XML and added several more.

I decided to add an alternate tech up path to get the player to make some tough decisions.

You can now morph the castle into a keep which allows you to produce some new units and structures with unique, in this particular game, they are pretty common in standard RTS, capabilities. The keep can recruit up to 8 Royal Guards, possibly more with facility purchases. This area will also be where the layered upgrades work. The normal units function as individuals so type based upgrades won't work, but these units can get them. They are controlled like traditional RTS units such as in Glest.

The Keep also constructs Guard Barracks which produce City Guards. CGs are better than regular Guards from the Guard Houses but weaker than Royal Guards. The Barracks have a variety of layered upgrades and capacity increases. You can get some decent numbers of Guards.

Barracks also produce City Archers which follow the same rules. They have a special ability. A special Guard Tower can be constructed from the Keep which is slightly more powerful than a Guard House. However it doesn't come with the 2 free guards. It has the Load Bonus ability I added to the game whereby loading a designated unit with the Garrison Command(copied off the load command) gives it some sort of boost. In this case City Archers increase the attack speed of the structure to simulate more defenders. This protects the defenders and make them a little more powerful than normal.

Palace Guards, City Guards, and City Archers are all player controllable. You can man different Guard Towers depending on where you are being attacks and move guards to protect important buildings during attacks.

City units are both weaker and cheaper than Order members. You can get more without capacity increases and control them directly but their structures are comparatively expensive. Further more Order houses generally require 10 or less population while the Keep and the Barracks require 20 or more because City units are drawn directly from your population theme wise and this is reflected in the mechanics.

Furthermore having to micro units takes away from management and strategic decision time. The benefits of City units are offset by their opportunity cost.

Now that I've got that part down I need to do some serious economics work. Although the Order of Defenders is mostly done I think I should get the economy down with the various resources and items before I dig into the combat. And honestly the economic content is the more original and interesting aspect plus it ties into the items that Order units purchase. Potions and weapons and magic jewelry and crap.

Plus the economics are what generate the reasons for combat. As the monsters attacks and raids increase over time its necessary to secure the resource points to get the new items and consumables and what not to keep your units up to speed. Resources do some other stuff as well. I hadn't initially planned to use actual resource models but it just happened. Harvestable resources just seemed like a good way to force expansion and land control. In Majesty you just had one settlement and abused flags.
Title: Re: Mandate: FKS Art Assets
Post by: MoLAoS on 29 November 2012, 09:29:38
I was digging around the web for some resource and units icons and I managed to locate a series of about 100 free resource icons that appear to be CC licensed. This is going to save me weeks of designing my own icons which would end up pretty inferior to these professional ones.

Edit:
The designer got back to me super fast saying just stick his name in the art credits. Its so hard to find a large set of icons without a super cartoony art style so this is pretty great for me. MagiTech + mod factions do have a butt load of icons but since the engine was initially Warcraft based there are like 10 resource icons total from all the factions I downloaded.

A link to an image with most of them displayed is here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/mapping-elements/8270-natural-resources-icons-graphics-4.html#post96734

They will probably cover 90% of my needs, mostly the inanimate ones, the animals art style is not aligned with my preferences, but luckily game doesnt have any animals as is currently designed.
Title: Re: Mandate Map Editor Updates
Post by: MoLAoS on 1 December 2012, 03:49:33
I have managed to figure out the map editor enough to modify the number of resources available to place. My current game needs at least 10. I may be able to fob some others off on the tile set for herbs and what not, or I may need to expand the count again.

In any case I expect that when I get back to enginey work post release of my current game project I'll be making some significant map_editor modifications as well. I had some fun modding the editor, it was just so easy and there where no hitches and uncomplicated changes for important effect make me quit happy :P
Title: ME: Fantasy Kingdom: Livestock
Post by: MoLAoS on 9 December 2012, 14:46:14
I finished quite a bit of work on the livestock system of the game. I did the live stock farm unit and its associated resources and items.

Each farm has space for 4 livestock pens. You can use any combination of livestock: Cows Pigs Sheep Goats

Each kind of livestock has its own products that it creates:
Cows: Leather, Milk, Meat
Sheep: Wool, Meat
Goats: Meat, Milk
Pig: Meat

Although the pig only has one type of product it is much cheaper, breeds faster, can have more per farm and so forth. Its per animal meat production is the lowest however. Pigs give a higher total meat production but do lack secondary products. Goats provide less meat than pigs but provide cheap and plentiful milk. Sheep provide the least meat if you max out herds but provide valuable wool for various items. Cows provide the second least meat with maxed herds but provide valuable leather for armor and other things as well as good milk production.

The farm requires pens and also processing sheds like the milking shed the shearing shed and the 4 butchers sheds, one for each type. The reason that butcher sheds are separate per animal is so that you only kill animals you want to kill for meat or leather. The wool and milking processes take advantage of the new consumed indicator. Ie they don't consume your animal resources whereas meat obviously does.

There may be a use for other animal products like dung for fertilizer and possibly animal blood for possible vampiric creatures/units and/or for magic rituals of some orders.

There may also be some interaction with the crop farms in terms of animal feed and of course needing both wheat and milk to create bread products. There will be both dairies that buy milk and sell cheese and possibly other products to townsfolk as well as bakers which make bread products of various kinds for sale. Food products mostly get sold to townsfolk so that you can tax shops and guilds for money. Further because guilds and farms have the same local economy system as Orders they need to earn money to expand.

I should finish the crop farm system today and create the market stalls for dairy and butcher and so forth. There may or may not be vegetables. Currently I have only done grains.
Title: Re: Mandate Engine: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator
Post by: MoLAoS on 16 December 2012, 15:46:15
Generating a release version so I can use a recording program.

The video will appear in the first post as soon as youtube ends it multi hour slow as molasses upload.

I am going to make a video show me recruiting some peasants, building a market and a livestock farm and then buying 2 cattle pens and a milking shed plus four additional cows.

I modified the item command so that it functions as a superior GAE GenerateCommandType command with which to exchange one resource, in this case gold, for another resource or even varied other resources, in this case a cow, a goat, a pig, or a sheep. Cows for the demonstration. If the item in question has its type tag as stock it will not produce an item but merely apply the costs. -1 Cow locally and 50 gold locally in the case of the Cow item.

You will see the cattle pen breed cows over time and the milk shed process cows, using the new consume tag set to false which means the cows won't be removed, to generate the milk resource.

I will then build a quartermaster at the market who will search for a building that possesses the resources which it likes to buy, as defined by the new resource stores xml tag which specifies and arbitrary number of resources to attempt to buy, by type and amount. It will determine that since the market is a shop and the livestock farm is a guildhall that it can purchase the resource milk which the farm has and which it wants to buy.

The Quartermaster will then exchange gold from the Market's local storage for Milk at the Livestock Farm's local storage at the price defined in the faction XML for the Kingdom faction, in this case 3 gold. So the Market will transfer 120 gold to the Livestock Farm to buy all the milk it has, 40 per 30 seconds with one Milk Shed and at least 4 cows since the process defined in the Milk Shed trades 3 Cows for 10 Milk not consuming the cows and it cycles up to 4 times, the maximum productivity of the shed is thus 40 Milk if the Livestock Farm has at least 12 Cows.

Following the purchase by the Market the nearby Houses will attempt to buy the Milk requiring at least 10 to buy and having a maximum desire of 25 Milk stored at once.

Houses generate an amount of Wealth every 30 seconds half of which can be taken by Tax Collectors from the Castle or Keep. The remaining Wealth can be used by the House to purchase Goods, resources, in this case Milk, at the going price, in this case 3 gold.

Technically the Market neither makes nor loses wealth in purchasing Goods, since it buys at the same cost as it sells. The actual money which is collected from the Market is generated by the Houses.

There may later be an override cost so that the farm sells at say 3 and the Dairy guild buys at 4, and then makes cheese which it sells for 6 and which houses buy for 6. This is more realistic and would make for a more interesting economy. I have so much work to do however that this will have to wait.
Title: Mandate: Extending Processes
Post by: MoLAoS on 18 December 2012, 17:53:29
I have added a lot of functionality to processes in order to make it more useful. I mean resource processing with costs and outputs.

Previously you could specify a cost and a number of out puts for the cost, as well as a timer and specify if it went into local or faction storage.

I have added several things.

You can specify a count where it checks the available resources and repeats the process if you have available resources:

Here is an example:
    <processing>
      <processes>
        <process timer="30" count="1" scope="local"> happens every 30 seconds, limit of one time.
          <costs>
            <cost name="corn" consume="false" amount="0"/> cost of 0 corn normally, the bonus is the part i needed a process for
          </costs>
          <bonuses> bonus is an optional cost that adds value if met
            <cost cost-name="manure" prod-name="corn" count="5" consume="true" amount="2" plus="20" multiply="0"/>
          </bonuses> can use up to 10 manure, needs at least 2, gives 20 extra corn per 2 manure does not have a multiplier currently
          <products>
            <product name="corn" amount="100"/>
          </products>
        </process>
      </processes>
    </processing>

    <processing>
        <processes>
          <process timer="30" count="4" scope="local"> happens every 30 seconds, can happen 4 times if you have more cows
            <costs>
              <cost name="cow" amount="8" consume="false"/> consume is false the resource cost does not reduce your stored cows
            </costs>
            <products>
              <product name="cow" amount="1"/> produces 1 new cow
            </products>
          </process>
          <process timer="30" count="8" scope="local"> triggers 8 times triggers every 30 seconds
            <costs>
              <cost name="cow" amount="2" consume="false"/> costs 2 cows per manure, since we don't want too much to exist
            </costs>
            <products>
              <product name="manure" amount="1"/> produces one manure per run, to a max of 8 based on the count tag
            </products>
          </process>
        </processes>
    </processing>

    <processing>
        <processes>
          <process timer="30" count="2" scope="local">triggers twice, otherwise need more sheds, 30 second timer
            <costs>
              <cost name="cow" consume="true" amount="1"/> costs 1 cow, note that consume is set to true, you lose the cow
            </costs>
            <products>
              <product name="meat" amount="5"/> produces 5 meat
            </products>
          </process>
        </processes>
    </processing>
Title: Re: Mandate Code Clean Up
Post by: MoLAoS on 20 December 2012, 17:03:58
Today I have done a bit of code cleanup, mostly in the UI. I fixed some config files and added my newer displays to the position files so that you can save their positions. I fiddled with some other stuff as well.

I think I might take a break from the game demo to add some more code to heroes.

Basically what has been described previously such as the special Exp, the 3 spheres of experience, new skills and single stat boosts and so forth.

However I think I will finish up some XML editing for the economy first, I have most of the guilds, the farms, the market, houses, the castle and the keep, so I need to move up to the next level, shops. This level has the blacksmith, alchemist, enchanters and other such things.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 21 December 2012, 03:32:16
I spent a lot of time today adding new functions to the item system so that certain aspects were more usable in my game.

There is a new item store section of UnitType so you can cap how many items of a given type can be stored. This had previously been just a total item cap but sadly this was a problem because units/buildings who need to generate lots of items for sale would easily exceed a limit and they keep generating old classes of items even after you get better ones. Sometimes you want that and sometimes you don't. The individual cap alleviates that although later you may be able to toggle processes and item creation on and off.

Game wise I spent quite a bit of time creating the 12 tiers of swords and cuirass that can be bought to replace a units starting "wood" items. There is one level for each of the metal ores found in the game. However later bars of metal will require both iron and copper as well as their main metal type. Copper for copper, iron for iron, coal and iron for steel, lead and iron and coal for leaded armor, silver iron and coal for silvered, gold iron and coal and copper for guilded and so forth. This makes it harder to tech up, you can't really skip levels, and it makes older ores like copper and iron and steel retain some value.

Currently the item classes to be included are:
sword/axe/spear/lance
bow/crossbow/longbow
cuirass
helmet/helm
pauldrons
guantlets/braces
greaves
boots

Each item will have 11 tiers of metal and then mages will use cloth items with wire and adornments of various metal, archers and some special classes can have leather with wire and banding and other attachments to class up.

Although there are over 50 resources and hundreds of items it appears that skills, and thus models, are the bottleneck in loading and memory, so this won't affect load times or ram usage significantly.

I do believe that the item system is finally totally fleshed out. The only significant change that may remain is how to assign models to skills/commands learned from items. Its possible that items will not contain these but stop at particle systems, and that animations will be stored in units only and special code will connect an animation to a skill as its learned from the item when the item is equipped.

Once I complete the addition of the hundred or so remaining items and doing the bmps, basically a standard image is used and recolored with GIMP per item class, I will be pretty much done with economics.

Although I originally hoped for herbs to be stored on maps using the same system as resources it appears that I may have to just use upgrades/items to imitate resources which will be unlocked as you level the herbalist and alchemist's guild. I simply lack the modelling ability to make new models for plants before my deadline.

Consumable items, mostly potions WILL be in the alpha release however and consumable items already function properly. Herbs were only part of the resource requirements.
Title: Re: Day Time Based Power
Post by: MoLAoS on 2 January 2013, 05:48:43
Units can now get an enhancement for both day and night to alter their stats based on the time of day. At some point the system will probably support changes at dawn, noon, dusk and midnight.

Later updates will support morphing, new skill options and changes to the various stats I added to the game like damage types and resistances based on the times of day.

I'm gonna look into adding some similar functionality for terrain and being near objects, much like the buidings being more or less powerful near the proper map objects.
Title: ME Update: Location Based Bonus
Post by: MoLAoS on 3 January 2013, 05:36:07
I added the bonus to a building's capabilities based on its proximity to a given map object. At some future point there will be the option to gain bonuses from multiple object types or multiple bonuses from multiple objects of the same type. There will also be a proximity test for other building types. I've just bought Sacrifice so I'll be busy for several hours on that after this.
Title: ME Code Clean Up
Post by: MoLAoS on 4 January 2013, 03:49:32
I have been doing a lot of code reorganization lately to streamline the change progress and make it much easier to understand.
The first thing I did was add the Statistics class as a base class for creatable or producible types.

Statistics inherits from EnhancementType but incorporates various other stats I've added like resistances and damage types and other things.
The computeTotalUpgrade function has been greatly simplified by using calls to Statistics::sum instead of EnhancementType::sum and a bunch of loops for resistances. I've reduced having the same code copied in multiple areas with this as well.

I am also moving lifesteal, manasteal/burn, and other on hit affects into this new class as optional stats. I am removing the attack-strength stat and the armor-type stat from EnhancementType/UnitStats as well. They are being replaced by the resistance/damage type system.

You can use a sort of global armor type by using an item and loading it as a starting item on appropriate units. Resistances exist on both item types and unit types.
Title: ME GUI Changes
Post by: MoLAoS on 5 January 2013, 22:54:07
Okay I finally worked out and got start on the other changes to the GUI besides items.

I moved resource storage out of the tool tip into the item display using icons, and now I'm moving processes and resource and unit and item creation out of the tool tip cause it just doesn't work there. Too much stuff.

I am gonna make a production panel for those 4 things using an icon system similar to the resource storage one.

Each process or creation will get its own special icon and each icon will have its own tool tip describing the process or creation action. I also figured out how to use buttons to select which extra panel besides main display is visible. I also move the unit name in the display panel so that the top row can hold the buttons, you still have the portrait with the normal longer tool tip, but then next to it in single selection you get up to 5 other buttons for other panels.

They should be:
Stats
Items
Stored Resources
Process and Creation
Carried Units

Resources might be pushed to a new panel of its own since it doesn't really fit into items per say, and it allows more space.
Process and Creation will have 4 sections, one for each of the 4 creation options.
Carried units will hold carried and garrisoned units, as well as holding units carried by the faction that that unit can unload.
Items will be the same inventory equipment thing it is currently.

Stored Resources is an optional panel I'm not sure if I'll do. Basically moves stored resource icons and values to a new panel where it can be more customized for the purpose and free up item panel space.

I've got the button section set up and the hide and display stuff. I just need to set up the actual panels as to what and how they show stuff.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 6 January 2013, 03:42:06
Edit:
Finished the Production Panel for the GUI. Headed ever onwards to the next panel, probably the carried unit panel. That section really gets in the way on the display panel, I can't even display all 3 types of carrying cause of space limitations. Then probably the stats panel and maybe the resource panel last.

Features I've already done or ones I have yet to do?

You could theoretically port over anything I did already or even that GAE did. Its a matter of having a programmer with time and the desire to do so which historically MegaGlest has not had. Either the devs are too busy with their real lives or they disagree that features are necessary enough to put on the to do list.
Title: (Update)EnhancementType Changes
Post by: MoLAoS on 9 January 2013, 03:32:01
Update:
I have finally after 3 days and lots of me being a moron and lots of the original Glest code being weird, managed to get the game to load perfectly and initiate units properly with my new version of EnhancementType. This makes the Xml both more manipulable and the source code much easier to understand and requiring fewer steps to modify.

I am currently porting the XML changes from my test faction to my main faction since the main one. It should be the last major Xml change, which is great because modifying so many Xml files is crazy annoying.

Before I went to do the final GUI panel I decided to do yet another rewrite of the basic unit stat code and the related code in skill and command types. I want to reduce the changes I would need to make to multiple files to add or remove things. I also wanted to finally finish certain aspects of the hero/mage/leader system.

I split up unit stats and enhancement type into smaller groups for various purposes. For instance the attack related values that can also go on attack skill types and other things. This will also help for me to add various other value to the attack section and stuff to other sections. I am adding separate repair build and production values for various unit types for instance.

For the RPG aspects I am adding 2 attack values that modify magical and physical attacks instead of attack strength adding to all skills. I am also adding skill points and other stuff. If you remember all those varied leveling/experience systems we talked about those are finally getting fleshed out. You can either buy things directly from experience or you get skill points and/or level for experience.
Title: (Update 2)ME: SkillType Refactor
Post by: MoLAoS on 11 January 2013, 07:30:20
Update 2:
I reversed some changes because it was just not worth it to store attack range and attack speed or attack skills in the attack stats class. But I still added the optional tags stuff and the generic skill things. You can leave out certain tags that would be set to the default value.

I think I will try and work on some more game play related stuff now. Take a break from boring technical crap.

Update:
I finally got all the way through the main effort of the refactor. I'm just cleaning up a few obscure bugs from the change and fixing some stuff because the system wasn't really meant to be extended this way. I expect to be done before I go to sleep tonight. Stop, Move, and Die however are all functioning properly as are some others.

I decided to blow another day or 2 and do a buttload of work on rewriting the skill type code. I am moving a bunch of stuff from regular skill type to the more appropriate place. The source should be much more readable and the capabilities of skills to utilize new features will be greatly increased.

I am setting up skills to take various unit resources as a cost:
Energy/Mana
Health
Stamina
Shield points

Skills should be able to cost local resources and/or items as well. A unit can generate a ammunition and incendiaries by creating items on a timer up to a cap, and then they can consume those items to use a skill. So bullets or grenades and such, or crossbow bolts of various metals and/or with various special effects, like fire arrows or poisoned ones. I believe the code will grab an effect from the item and apply it to the target.

Title: Fancy Modified GUI
Post by: MoLAoS on 20 January 2013, 09:43:33
I finally finished up the 5 new GUI panels:
Stats
Items
Storage
Production
Carried Units

Now when you have only one unit selected the selection panel will have 6 icons instead of just the portrait. Clicking on the old portrait icon will clear all the other GUI screens. Clicking on any other icon will set the associated panel to be visible and accept input. I will presumably stick in some hot keys as well at some point. Since my game isn't a micro click fest I personally don't consider them useful but I know I'm a weirdo. Each other button will auto clear all the panels not used by it since there is only space for one panel generally although some method to have them all up could be done with hotkeys or something.

Stats shows the full spectrum of stats probably eventually with icons for each stat. I would like to make a method that allows items to have their own access to extended knowledge, for now its limited to tool tips and if the item doesn't have too much shit it should be fine.

Items is the previously videod and described item panel, minus holding the resource storage section.

Storage holds an icon based display of all resources a unit can store and how many are stored. I might fudge some string conversions to show 10000 or more as the number of thousands with a k and maybe the tool tip shows the precise value.

Production has an icon for each resource item or unit created and one for each process. Tooltips describe the actual timers and amounts.

Finally carried holds a list of all the carried units, those are normal carried units, all garrisoned units, they provide bonuses to stats, and then finally transiting units, those are carried in the faction and can be loaded or unloaded at any unit with the appropriate skill. Currently I'm thinking you can see 24 of each in the panel.

I'll probably have to add some panels later for units where you can control their level ups but maybe I'll have a better GUI by then.
Title: ME: Biome Info
Post by: MoLAoS on 26 January 2013, 00:43:58
As part of the discussion I linked to in my other thread I talked about drastically increasing the effect of environment on gameplay.

As part of that idea I am going to attempt to add biome information to tiles that can change over time in the game. This will probably also require some sort of modification of the map editor and tile sets again. Currently maps don't support multiple tilesets or very many map objects. Larger maps might also be helpful. My computer is a laptop with intel core 2 duo and gets whiny at about medium sized maps, 128 * 128. I'll have to figure out why that is. I'd like to be able to play at least 256 * 256 sized maps on my computer without noticeable lag. And a serious gaming computer should be able to do 1024 * 1024 or larger.

I'd like to be able to have about 20 unique map objects per tileset plus trees and stones and mountains as basic ones. I probably want a single tile set to support up to 8 biomes and have some way of visually representing changes that gameplay can make. I'd like to maybe have some sort of heat haze or cold fog or something but that might be difficult graphically. And for deserts some kind of sand haze and what not.

You could still make a regular tileset by just not filling in as many objects as would be possible.

Having some sort of environment data opens up a lot of options for gameplay and narrative and its something I really like as a way of letting the faction play be modified by what environment resources are accessible. So I really hope I can get this whole thing figured out. The biome stuff could also just be a graphical thing if you didn't purposefully attach any game play to it. So more deserty deserts and what not.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 24 March 2013, 06:03:36
After my absence playing CK2 I decided to implement a bit of their Character development, and that of KoDP into my current project. Higher class citizens as well as heroes and special player controlled units will be used to fill various niches in society and as such will have individual talents and traits. They will be able to increase these stats and gain new traits from both standard game interaction and special events. Further, KoDP style events will now cause various affects in the game including alliances with special non map based societies/organizations, discoveries of magical structures and new resources and so forth. Various powers might bless heroes or the player's special personal units. Buildings might be given special upgrades in events as well such as the ability to produce new items, create better goods, and orders will gain possible new skills/spells/units. Various pre-designated non player societies on the map will interact differently based on what orders and buildings you have as well as other factors.

There will also be an overworld map whereby you can play different cities in the same world and they will run concurrently to some degree. This will be simulated more by a series of data points whereby other cities can send or request various goods or units from you. But this will be derived from the actual map of an area after you have played on it.
Title: (Complete)MEU: Faction Type Rework
Post by: MoLAoS on 27 March 2013, 00:19:45
This particular aspect of the code has been completed. You can now set any number of included factions in a faction. You can then access those faction type's units from the faction build menu or designate units of that faction to be built from your main faction starting units menu. On game start only the top level faction type will supply starting units or resources. Lower level faction type starting unit and resource lists will be ignored.

As I was working on support for neutral structures, although you can add non-neutral ones in the new map editor, I decided that a rework of the concept of faction types was in order.

Faction Types will still be static, and the const keyword can still be applied to them in source. But there will be a bit of a change. Each FactionType can hold a vector of names of other faction types which are included by default in them. I know in most traditional cases this is not strictly necessary. But some games involve a set of common structures. WBC3 has mines for instance. This will now be possible with the new system.

A single faction can now use units from multiple faction types. There will be a default neutral faction, sort of like Gaia is currently. This will also enable the capturing mechanic I did a lot of work on to become more powerful. Previously you were only able to capture buildings from another player with the same faction type, I think you may get a crash trying to convert other faction type's units, although I didn't actually test it. There is very little source code bloat or memory bloat here. FactionTypes are just a pointer, so another pointer is added.

There are a couple applications here, even if I'm the only one who makes games weird enough to use them. For those of us who are lazy about modelling you can layer faction types. So I can use the same model for multiple worker units or barracks or other generic buildings.

So neutral faction. Then a basic faction on top of the neutral one. Then 2 or more factions on top of the basic one. But sharing the same XML and textures and model files. Saving up on that memory and what not. Saving me the trouble of changing multiple XMLs and so forth.

I can use layering for other stuff, too. Maybe I have a 3rd layer in common. So neutral, basic, city-building, then a faction with fire mages. And then another faction on top of that. The fire mage faction would be the AI, but as a player I could get extra stuff. And you don't have to tell the AI not to build it because they can't use it at all. There was other stuff but I can't remember at the moment.
Title: MEU: FType Issue(Resolved)
Post by: MoLAoS on 27 March 2013, 20:15:52
I believe this issue is now resolved. I have not been able to duplicate the error.

It appears that there is a slight error in the unit description. The getFactionString function derives the faction type name from the faction class, whereas units from other types are not from that faction type. I shall have to fiddle around. The function takes Faction as an argument, maybe I can make it take FactionType instead.
Title: MEU: Video Issue Resolved
Post by: MoLAoS on 28 March 2013, 23:10:29
Turns out that resolving the lag issue enables release version videos to be recorded. So possibly a new video will come out this week.

I will demonstrate the new multi panel unit menu and perhaps some other things. There won't be a demonstration of the map editor for a while. Still has some kinks to work out.

I will demonstrate how a single FactionType can load other FactionTypes and how you can use the build menu to create them in game. This is only partially implemented. Or rather I only have a single unit in the game due to XML updating. I will add the units for my actual project once the XML pattern is organized. I will attempt to add voice and maybe quiet sound in this video so its less disturbing.

I may also demonstrate some other stuff and explain some things that are not new features.
Title: MEU: Traits and Events: P1
Post by: MoLAoS on 29 March 2013, 19:26:35
This is an idea I thought up while playing CK2. It fits into my plans to have varying levels of RPG spread among my classes of units, classes being worker, guard, military, hero, overseer, leader, and so forth. This is distinct from UnitType. I suppose I should do some details of this before I get to traits and events.

Actually this post became too large, so I'll drop traits and events to the next one:

Worker is the general unit type. These can involve resource gatherers, units you garrison to buildings that gather resources, units that transport resources around, units that go out to buy resources such as raw materials and processed ones from other buildings/groups, builder units, tax collectors, and other such things.

Guard involves mostly what it says, guards of buildings. Guilds, Orders, Manors, and Palaces all have these units, or rather you can decided to recruit them. They mostly protect their home structure and buildings associated with their organization, their may be special abilities to call all guards to defend the settlement though. They are AI units, like heroes, and some Workers.

Military is the directly player controlled RTS style combat units. So as described elsewhere the city guards/archers that you control like an RTS unit with micro. You can garrison them in guard towers and such for more arrow attack speed and such. This is a minor class in the current game I am working on.

Hero is the traditional Majesty unit, recruited from a guild, or in my case Order, controlled by AI, has levels multiple skills, gains stat boosts and buys items. May also have other personality traits that cause other actions.

Overseers are special economic units that act to provide buffs to structures and groups. An Overseer might provide gathering and movement speed buffs to gatherers, or be assigned to a building to produce production/processing/crafting boosts and may even increase the quality of the goods or produce goods itself that are special. My current project involves garrisoning units in buildings to create production rather than a building doing the work at a static value like most games. Even citybuilders don't tend to do this.

Leaders are units that work like overseers but with heroes and possibly guards. In other games they may lead military units, but you shouldn't have enough of those in this game for that to be necessary. Each order produces its own unique leaders, especially the preceptor of the order who controls the motherhouse. These are the most powerful example. Most Orders have normal heroes, champions which are less numerous but stronger, and a preceptor. Some Orders have special other units, like the Bannerman of the Defenders who has leadership powers. They provide buffs in an area like the preceptor, but they also cause other units to follow their lead. This is one of the ways of forming "parties" for adventurers. There will be cross Order parties though.

Guard leaders are just slightly more powerful versions of a the guard that can provide buffs and direct troops. Basically they can lead any number of guards in an organized way. They won't be too common since you shouldn't have a lot of guards working for one group, although the total number may be high.

The player also controls a special sovereign unit. His Order is the castle and it has various facilities and upgrades that give him new powers. He can be assigned to work as an overseer, a researcher, a leader of troops and such. Pretty much any leadership position. He may gather a party of adventurers to follow him, but not a game breakingly large one and they still do their own thing, they just follow and support him.
Title: MEU: Traits and Events: P2
Post by: MoLAoS on 29 March 2013, 19:43:01
Here we actually get to the traits and events systems. These two systems can be separated from the Characters aspect described above. But they do contain some aspects that only work with that.

Traits are sort of like modifications, but they are earned in another way. You can set a series of requirements, which once met either give the trait directly, or give a chance for an event to confer the trait. In some cases a series of events or actions may increase a progress stat which upon reach 100 will confer the trait. You could also lose a trait if you did the wrong things. This aspect is less of a Majesty thing, but the trait system is broad and generic because its an engine rather than a game feature.

Traits may confer the following benefits:
a bonus to statistics, the GAE EnhancementType class type stuff, as well as to resistances and damage bonuses.
a bonus to your equipment slots for items
an effect, the GAE EffectType class kind

Traits are generally thematic, sort of an upgrade for a single unit, but earned in a different manner

There are some special traits, almost always conferred by an event or even chain that may confer a tag and possibly some associated skills as well. For instance the hypothetical trait Dragon Friend may confer, in addition to fire resistance or some other regular trait benefit, a skill to temporarily summon a dragon, or dragons, to fight on the units side.

Events are the next thing I want to discuss. Events can do many thing. They are sort of like the various events you can create with scenario scripting. However they are not intended to be part of a larger scripted story, but merely one or a chain of generic semi-random events that can mix and match in a non-scenario game. You can assign a chance to ever world tick occur as well as either triggers or modifiers of that chance. Events can give a resource bonus, confer traits, spawn allied or enemy or neutral units, cause new map objects to appear with or without buildings on them, confer upgrades, confer effects, grant modifications to a unit or units, such as a god granting poison to all your heroes' weapons and other similar things. Events can be triggered or have their chance to trigger modified by various things such as traits on units, numbers of units of a type, the level of a unit, resource stores, one or more various buildings made, building buildings on certain map objects or even previous events or series of events.

Events can also trigger some of the weather and map effects I am working on adding to the game such as droughts and storms and so forth. They can even deal damage to player or enemy units and structures.
Title: MEU: Skill Costs
Post by: MoLAoS on 7 April 2013, 19:51:12
Skill costs are now enabled. You can charge hp or ep or even Mandate's sp value for skills. Presumably you could do some sort of stamina cost as well. And of course the previously added cooldown system functions.

There is also the possibility of charging a resource or even item cost for skills.

In the future skills can be allowed based even on map objects or buildings. For instance being near a volcano could allow fire type units to cast extra abilities, or any heat source really. Same for water and ice mages and rivers and so forth.

There will also be a pet sacrifice option or even a unit sacrifice option. Suicide spells are of course easy to do with just the regular hp cost option.

I've also been looking at ways to link up units and skills. For instance drawing mana to cast a spell from a mana potion. Or even having spells that consume mana from nearby other units, possibly with some sort of skill interaction where the power of the spell is better if multiple strong units are involved.

I recall making some posts about this in some of my earlier game designs but those are probably deleted.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Sovereign)
Post by: MoLAoS on 13 April 2013, 18:11:57
I am going to do a rundown of game features/mechanics here. Mainly for myself but read it if you like. I'll start with the player's main character.

Sovereign(Player Character):
This is the character you have the most power over, aside from the city guard. He can train and work in all spheres of the game including economic, technical, magical, and military. He has several buildings associated with him, primarily the castle. I have decided that you are limited to only one castle.

At the start of the game the sovereign goes through a character creation process similar to the kind found in RPGs. You will select a focus for him from among the spheres of play although this doesn't prevent him from working in other spheres, it simply the one he will be better at progressing in and his base skills.
Diplomacy allows him to deal with other sovereigns, lords, and even traders.
Military allows him to fight better, have some leadership skills, and other such things.
Economics allows him to produce goods, increase the production of others, collect taxes and so forth.
Magic allows him to cast better spells, research new spells, and help other major characters do these things.
Historian/Linguist allows him to get a small general bonus to research, speak other languages for diplo value and events and other things.

The capabilities of your sovereign influence both the events you get and what options you have, to some degree.

The Sovereign can be used to run production, lead guards, assist hero parties, do research, explore, fight, cast magic, interact with lords, and do diplomacy with other nations.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Lords)
Post by: MoLAoS on 13 April 2013, 18:25:08
System of Lords:
Lords are characters you assign land to. Their main building is the Manor. Tax collectors spawn from the manor. Lords do various things based on their personality. They might collect a library, which your Sovereign or possibly other characters can learn from. Some lords will field a lot of city guard to protect their lands. Lords may donate money to local Orders as well.

Lords will often provide you with services, as their ruler. They may deploy guards to protect your personal lands, or send you money, or give other items to you. Land within a lords demesne provides taxes to them, but a % of those taxes reaches you based on the taxes you set. Tax collectors do not have to collect from lords, the money is put in your treasury automagically. Lords may also exist off of the map, depending on if I get the cross map interaction working.

Lords may make requests of you, to defend their city or kill monsters or other such things. If they really dislike you they may rebel or merely defect.

Other existing lords or sovereigns may exist on your current map or other maps, or imaginary maps that don't actually exist but are merely collections of characters with some resources and troops.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Books)
Post by: MoLAoS on 13 April 2013, 20:07:35
Books/Research are a new addition of mine to technology like systems. Basically your sovereign and/or possibly other special characters have libraries which allow them to learn new things by reading them over a period of time. This is a significant investment but its generally worth it. Lords can own and read books which will allow them to have some diversity of technology which may be useful and determine who you place.

Books can be gained by events, from lords and sovereigns, sometimes from Order leaders, and also from Sorcerers, basically individual renegade wizards.

They can teach you all sorts of things, from new city guard options, to new buildings, to being able to create non Order mages, though they would obviously be weaker. Your sovereign can learn spells and magic and new buildings and units and bonuses to his RPGish stuff like production and diplomacy. He gets some books in the library for his focus as well.

I'm still thinking about whether I can slot books into the existing research system or if I should add a new class.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Guilds)
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 April 2013, 02:01:12
Guilds are the economic organizations that you deal with in the game. Guilds harvest, produce, and process resources, as well as turning resources into items. Guilds are run by a guild master at the main branch. It has guards, haulers and quarter masters. Haulers move resources in between guild structures for free, quartermasters purchase items and resources from other guilds, and from orders, and from other places for gold defined in the faction xml. Guards will protect only the main structure and possibly its associated structures and not the other structures in the settlement.

Guilds possess their own treasury and use it to buy required stuff as well as pay for units, items, upgrades, and so forth. They sell their production for money as well. Guilds are given half their cost in gold when you found them, from your treasury. Afterwards you may tax them at any rate, but be careful you don't prevent them from having enough money to buy materials and improve.

Guilds mainly produce items, facilities being the name, to improve their production and storage and number of units. However they can also produce other buildings to aid in production or move goods across long distances. They may also hire heroes to transport valuable goods.

Guild masters control the guild and your relationship can get you quite a lot such as discounts on what they produce and possibly rare items including books.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Houses)
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 April 2013, 03:08:49
Houses are the basis of your income to some degree. At least its the most reliable. Houses produce a basic amount of taxes but to do well you need to do better than that. Each house desires a certain number of goods of several types. As many food items as possible, various types of clothing, and other things such as books, although not Books.

Much like an Impressions game having their needs met involves an increase in housing level. However its not quite the same. Early levels increase somewhat in population, only a factor of 2, that is from about 5 people to 10. These are only working class citizens. After you have certain upgrades and knowledge you gain the ability to do other things.

The first other kind of house is the apartment. These are low level with few requirements. Mainly they house urban worker classes. They are relatively cheap and weak structures. They can house up to 100 people but are only 4x as large as houses footprint wise. These people are mainly good for craft and labor jobs. Only regular citizens may live here.

The second and quite important kind of house is that of the educated classes. These houses produce fewer people and they do not gain more as they improve. They can hold 1-5 people. These people are required to take the best jobs. This housing should generally be put up near libraries or universities or some of the guilds like mages guilds.

Educated citizens may also end up having stats sort of like lords and sovereigns. Not sure.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Markets)
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 April 2013, 03:25:44
Markets are the linchpin in the economics of the game. They are a sort of middleman between guilds and houses. Markets buy resources and possible items that are sold to houses. Markets have quartermasters who go out and buy things and the householder of the house comes to the market to buy anything he needs that he can afford.

Markets have quartermasters which you may need to purchase to increase the speed of gathering. They also have to buy stalls which is what sell goods. Markets sell goods slightly higher than the cost they buy them for which is what allows them to purchase new things.

Distribution of markets is quite important. You need one at most settlements and you may need a few depending. Markets need to be near supply if possible so that quartermasters don't need to move too far thus not insuring good supply. I might work in some stuff involving a higher level market called a bazaar that brings in trade and rare items and resources.
Title: MEU: Gameplay Overview(Harvested Resources)
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 April 2013, 03:41:49
Metals are one of the classes of resources in the game. Different metals have different strengths and rarities. The main value of metals is used in production of tools, weapons, and armor. Metals can also be used to reinforce buildings.

Metals have various properties in other processes. Each metal has a unique magical profile that makes it required for certain magic goods.

Crystals are another resource, they are primarily if not entirely used for the purposes of magic. Each type has different uses or qualities. Crystals can be used in things like scrying, storing large quantities of magic, and being transformers in mechanisms.

Herbs are the third important resource. Herbs are primarily used in potions of varying powers and effects which can be bought and consumed by heroes. High level items or more advanced processes might also require potions and alchemical concoctions of some kind.

Various guilds would gather and process these resources and sell them to end creators and from there to end users.

Many resources can be produced by buildings. But these cannot. Maintaining a supply of these resources is critical to success. Especially if you start to rely on them and then lose them. It could cause economic chaos.
Title: MEU: Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!(Upgrades and Items Can Now Add Entirely New Abilities)
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 April 2013, 18:44:31
Yes, you read that right. You can now put totally new skills/commands onto units using upgrades, items, modifications, or basically any mechanic that derives from the CreatableType class.

I am currently working to refine this. For instance linking, if you want to, new commands to already existing skills, currently Commands want to have a skill that is on the same creatable type object.
Title: MEU: Boring Refactor
Post by: MoLAoS on 15 April 2013, 21:31:17
I've separated the skill and command system from creatable type, previously from unit type, to the Actions class. This allows for my skill/command addition and subtraction system to work much better and apply to things that don't need the full creatable type class.

I'm gonna set up Actions to all the relevant classes so that they can all carry skills/commands around and then try and see if I can get it to accept a command only that hooks to a previous skill to try and cut down on space usage.

I think I will probably try and set up the default skill/command loader too since I'm in the area. There is really no reason that you need to define a stop and be_built and move skill for every unit. Having a basic move skill would be good to make formations work better later as well. Having a skill to give to all units to make them move the same speed would be really helpful imo.
Title: MEU: New Video
Post by: MoLAoS on 16 April 2013, 22:36:11
This video isn't super exciting and honestly isn't even worth showing to people who don't use Glest. But it does demonstrate some of the new capabilities I've added and if you play GAE/MG its possible to tell the difference:

http://youtu.be/HDor2CsAkCk
The video is now uploaded fully to youtube. For the 50 total views it will get.
Title: MEU: Sovereign Creation Screen
Post by: MoLAoS on 17 April 2013, 01:51:25
While I am waiting for my video to upload, 35 more minutes, I am in the process of designing the Sovereign Creator. Since Heroes have a different meaning in my engine I have to decided to use this word. And it fits the first game, you actually are a sovereign. A Sovereign is a top level character, all the options for units/heroes/mages/leaders/sovereigns are available for them. Once I get this done there may be in-game editors for all of those things as well. Or perhaps the unit editor will be all the same screen and you can turn off the additional classes(in the C++ sense) that you don't need, all the way down to a basic unit.

Currently I am getting the bare bones menu up, but I expect to finish the whole thing some time this week. You will be able to design a fully functional Sovereign, possibly minus traits, but once the rest of it is up that will be trivial to add once the traits and events systems are fully done.

These characters will be stored in a standard unit file, not sure if in the faction or in the tech tree. So its perfectly possible to use direct XML editing as well.
Title: MEU(Done): Skills With Levels
Post by: MoLAoS on 17 April 2013, 19:02:05
When I started working on the unit editor I realized I was missing significant aspects of the Hero/Leader/Sovereign classes. Sovereigns were intended to be played many ways but most of them included skills with levels. And skills don't have levels. You can upgrade a unit's base damage but you can't upgrade just a skill. So I may have to delay working on the editor for a few hours. Plus a couple days to finish the other aspects of the class.

Skills with levels will be accessible to even the regular units, but some functions probably won't.

After about 2 hours of work I got skills with levels to work, although gonna need to redo some XML. Blah.
You can define multiple levels of a skill, not additive, you need to put the exact stats for each level, is more flexible anyways.
I was thinking it might be better just to role the entirety of attacks into the effect_type class. Might eventually go that way.

Trying to think about what I need to implement next. The larger systems are so much harder to conceptualize in totality.
Title: MEU: New Provisional Release
Post by: MoLAoS on 29 April 2013, 03:53:59
You can now find an update version of the provisional release at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mandateengine/files/

This will be the final version of the Provisional Release. It contains the majority of the GAE relevant features. The Alpha Release will be a while out as I clean up new features and add in some others.

I'll be working on updating the XML now. Hopefully I can get it all done today or tomorrow.

I changed the location to download to my SourceForge page since I might get into trouble with my website people for too much up and down loading.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: GunChleoc on 29 April 2013, 07:27:44
I gave it a whirl on Windows 7 (64 bit).

First it complains that glew32.dll is missing, so I copied it into my GAE installation.

When I start the engine, it crashes. I started it again from a cmd window to see if I can get any output, but that is now stuck as well. Is this a Linux build only and no Windows build yet available?
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 29 April 2013, 07:38:57
I only compiled from my personal laptop, it has 32bit Windows 7. I am not able to compile it for other configurations. However the current source as well as gamedata is at my GitHub repo so you can compile it yourself for your setup. It shouldn't be too confusing but I can probably help you if you have trouble.

I redownloaded the zip archive from my site, although I recommend you use the SourceForge page from now on, and I ran the game with no problems. I'll try to find a way to compile for other Windows versions and for Linux in the future but I probably won't be too successful since I have minimal Linux experience.
Title: MEU: Sovereign Creator(Update)
Post by: MoLAoS on 2 May 2013, 11:00:07
I am slowly chugging away at the character creation screen. I've added a new folder to techs to hold specialization files. It will probably contain several other files as well. I'm am debating moving this to the faction folder but I am not sure.

I am going to post something I posted to rpg codex here to describe sovereign creation more in depth:
So I'm currently working on the character creator for my project. The game isn't a straight RPG, its more of an RTS/citybuilder with a simulation of important characters used by you to run a fantasy society. You can only directly create your Sovereign, the other characters with individual skills are randomly generated from your educated populace.

I want to divide the game into 5 spheres:
Magic
Military
Economics
History/Linguist/Research
Diplomacy

Currently I plan to set it up this way:
You choose a specialization in one of the 5 spheres, this gives you a significant boost to the skills and abilities and stats of that sphere upon game start.

H/L/R gives a boost to research speed. Researching is done using books gathered by various means. History allows you to find more books generally, linguist allows you to recognize what these books are for, and research allows you to turn their knowledge into knowledge you can use. You will have more options and better ability to make use of them with this specialization.

Diplomacy is pretty much what it says and it applies to be inter and intra society interactions. It lets you make better deals and pacts with other societies. It lets you do better with major characters in your own society as well. They might take pay cuts, offer you books, agree to work together better with other major characters and you, and do various other such things. This is important because you can't do everything yourself. You can't lead all the armies, in so far as armies can be led at all given that most military characters are agents in and of themselves. You cannot organize all the economic stuff yourself. You can't do all the research yourself and so forth.

Economics is concerned with trade and production. As a citybuilder type game you have to gather and process a lot of materials to produce a wide variety of goods both to placate the citizens and raise their education and economic level and to give to heroes and soldiers to defend the kingdom. These are mostly buffs to production rate and various other things.

Military is pretty obvious. Leadership of guards and the ability to lead a group of the AI heroes or at least possibly convince some to follow you. It also gives bonuses to your personal combat skills and stats.

Magic is perhaps more complex. It ties in to several areas. Magic has some bonuses to research. Magic has skills that influence the economy, magical production and also products that are more magical. There is a bit of a trade here as well. You can focus on magical goods or magical power. Basically if you invest in magic and economics properly you can mass produce all sorts of low level magical enchanted military equipment and production facilities. If you focus on magic and H/L/R you can get magical spells for casters that are more powerful and buff magical research in general to be faster and also be able to hold more spells at once and so forth.

Then we get to what I'll call the free allocation. Basically you have a number of points you can assign anywhere, with some prerequisites but those are mostly general. 1 Point in some broad skill compared to having 8 points in specific ones like floggoflopr and 4 in schtupersnock.

I will probably make certain skills only available in the specialization or perhaps it can just be that if you get 10 points in bladesmithing from economics and 5 from military than economics is necessary to max blade smithing and military is better than the other 3 but only second best.

Aside from that you will be able to allocate points in any skills you like, either focusing on your specialization or going down the economics route so that your magic specialization is used for magitech production and not mastery of arcane knowledge.

I'm trying to think of the best way to organize points to meet these goals. For instance if I don't cap the points you can add to a skill in free allocation, and I don't make the number quite small, you could subvert the Specialization to the point of being useless. I'd think its better to cap single skill allocation so that I can still have a ton of points to assign to make really specialized builds. You can of course level your Sovereign's skills during the actual game, possibly even above specialization, presuming you get the proper books and items and choose the right answer in events. But I feel some options should only be viable or available if you specialized right.

I also need to deal with the event system. Different non-default options are available based on your character. I don't want to use % chance too much. I think it just leads to save scumming. I would rather assign static values and then display the choices you qualify for with a 100% chance. Is this a good idea? Your choice in a few events won't decide the outcome of your game, so if I went random you wouldn't lose to a dice roll. But it might be pretty disappointing to see an amazing option and miss it because you got unlucky with a 90% chance.

Part of free allocation is spells/classes. I am wondering how much control to give the player. Should they be able to select individual spells? Should they only be able to spell schools?

So many decisions...

Anyways I am planning to have a text box where you choose a specialization and it displays what you get for that, maybe in a tool tip, not sure. Then you will move on to the free allocation. I decided to go ahead with schools of magic/spells/skills that you can select from. Then you will be able to pick some traits that give unique bonuses. Traits cost more points and may not be exactly as you like them, but you get a lot from a trait so you need to decide if the bonuses are worth it, especially since some may be unique. Then you can add points to various skills/stats individually. I hope to make many many possible combinations viable. We will see how that goes. Personally my first character is going to max out on languages, history, and research stats plus magic and then dump the rest into economics for magitech purposes. I'm probably going to totally ignore military and diplomacy.

Ever since my first academagia character specializing in history and language turned out to be useless cause those skills were only good for later game years I have wanted to be a magical linguist/historian.

Anyways I expect to have some good work done by the end of the weekend, possibly all the engine stuff will be done and only the XML to define the specialization will be left, to be completed later when I move from engine to game work.
Title: MEU: Sov Maker
Post by: MoLAoS on 8 May 2013, 13:20:23
So after having to clear out a lot of shit left over from something or other, things like pointers to faction type and tech tree that didn't do anything but were pushed all the way down various ::load functions, I got some work done.

I can now load a specialization into the Sovereign/Character Creator menu and it displays the CharacterStats, an RPG based attribute system. I just need to add a couple things and find a way to format them well for the limited GUI and then you can see all the things the specialization you pick will give you. Then finish up the free allocation section. Anyways its gonna take me longer than I thought cause of weird bugs and other non-sensical coding choices in the engine but I expect to be done by the end of the week if I'm lucky. That will be a pretty good step towards the game being done. Also this will help me get an in-game unit xml editor ready. Although I might shift generic editing to a standalone application. I won't do that editor for a while since I don't need it for the game but eventually it will be there and have all the flexibility of hand edits but with no annoying mistakes.

It wouldn't take so long but I had to do all the work of familiarizing myself with this aspect of the engine that I hadn't used before.

Hopefully I will get these kinds of characters integrated a week after the menu and get the crafting and traits done. Then really all I need is to do events, clean up, and enable the interactions of a couple classes.

Title: MEU: Arbitrary Energies
Post by: MoLAoS on 10 May 2013, 00:49:56
I've always felt like the current system of energy/mana is just not good enough. And my initial addition of shield points isn't too useful and its confusing. So I've decided to implement two new systems.

You can now arbitrarily define any number of energy systems. I know at first it may seem weird, who needs more than one. But I do. And I assume people will find a use given the capability being built in and easy to use.

Basically you assign a name and some values to the unit and then to their skills. Its possible just to use it for different energy systems per unit, but also for multiple ones on the same unit. For instance a stamina stat may power stronger attacks on melee units. A magic golem may have magic for spells but also electricity for normal operation.

I also added a defenses vector. Instead of having the shield points you can use any number of defensive shields. I already added resistances, but those are per hit. Now you can make a normal shield, or a shield blocking only physical damage or just fire or w/e. You can cast a spell to add a shield and a timer and so forth.

I want to have units that can ignore some kinds of shields. I'm not sure how well it will work out in practice but its not too hard to enable so I'm gonna try it out.

I had considered mediating shields through effects and I might change that around later. The energy system is more important and the shield thing just happens to be easy to build using the same code.
Title: MEU: (Done)Secondary Resource
Post by: MoLAoS on 11 May 2013, 19:35:26
You can now specify the secondary resource if you have one at all and you can give any number of extras. All units have Health but whether you have mana or energy or power or rage or stamina is all up to you. Some slight refinements are in order to integrate into later features but I can't do much there now.

Secondary resources are separately functioning so you may be able to combine them for various effects. I am also going to try and add some functionality for them. Although this might just be left to effects. On-hit burn/drain/restore should all be possible with the current effect system. I may still want to add stuff like getting "souls" from kills and then having a statistics/enhancement you can set in unit or item that gives a bonus per soul and some other stuff like that.

Defenses I am still working on though its mostly implemented. Things like shield spells or protoss style perma shield are probable. Shields can be tinkered to only affect a specific damage type and such stuff or absorb half damage or w/e. You could also have a one time shield that can't be restored or similar weird stuff.
Title: MEU: Character Creation
Post by: MoLAoS on 12 May 2013, 09:00:21
I am making some decent progress on character creation. I've been able to write valid XML to a file from in game. This will definitely allow me to create an in-game unit editor for people who don't want to mess with XML. I know I don't. So much clutter to deal with. XML is super verbose.

The creator writes formatted perfectly space xml and handles attributes and children and so forth. Which presumably isn't shocking to coders but is possibly useful to modders.

Anyways I'm probably gonna take a break. GUI programming and file writing is hella dull, even with solid libraries.
Title: MEUpdate: RPG Character Creator
Post by: MoLAoS on 18 May 2013, 19:40:26
So I got a lot of work done today while listening to some oldschool punk on youtube. Anyways I'm slowly fixing it so that all the relevant classes of Sovereign, the character class for your player character, will be filled and save into a file that is in the exact format that the ::load function for Sovereign uses. I knocked out EnhancementType, DamageTypes, Resistances just now. I also go some other stuff.

I mostly just need actions, which is the container class for skills and commands, so basically the abilities of your character, and then effectTypes. Actually I was thinking maybe your character doesn't need straight effect types. I am trying to think of any default emanations it would be good to have and I can't really. You probably only need activate emanations. So that means its really just skills.

I'm not sure how that will work really since I would need to standardize animation names so that more than one kind of unit could use a skill if they wanted.

I am trying to decide if I need a class/grouping system that will have some skills and bonuses or if I can just role that into traits since it technically holds the capability to do it.

Then I will be done with this part and only have to deal with mages/leaders/overseers and how to implement traits and dual classes and shit for them. This is somewhat easier since you can implement that in raw XML. A regular player doesn't need to design units so then there doesn't need to be a character creator for those which is good cause its a lot of work to make customizable units like the player character is.
Title: MEU: Traits(Class/Subclass Implementation)
Post by: MoLAoS on 22 May 2013, 20:44:15
Traits are going to end up serving a much more diverse role in the game than I originally intended. They contain all the necessary functionality to implement a psuedo-class so there is no reason to duplicate code.

As part of the addition of the Character Creator and the major character unit system I came to a point where I wanted to have schools of magic and other class/subclass type functionality and I realized it would be easier to use traits. In theory I could load these as multiple unit types but honestly unit-type has so much stuff that you only need once that its pointless.

Basically a subclass is implemented in a trait in a pretty obvious manner. For the pyromancy school of magic I am adding to the character creator there are a few options.

Pyromancer is a mage subclass which means it requires the mage trait as a prereq.

The Mage class is implemented as follows:
+5 conception since mages are smart
+10 potency so that the spells of a mage are stronger than a melee combat class since there is no strict skill typing
+50 mana because duh mages need mana
--some number of basic spells

The Pyromancer class is implemented on top of that as follows:
+5 conception because of a more intense knowledge focus
+5 potency because a focus in magic improves all spell damage
+25 mana because duh advanced mage
+10 fire damage
+5 fire resistance
--some number of fire based skills

Note that potency is a character stat for major characters that represents a generic increase to spell damage
Note that conception character stat that is a generic increase to knowledge acquisition because mages need to research new powers

Many bonuses are only available by subclass/trait like pyro fire damage. No matter how you spec a fire mage you can't get that bonus. All mage classes/subclasses get a bonus to mana potency and conception so a pyromancer and a hydromancer have a similar power there.

As far as my personal project goes the class system allows you to pick powerups based on experience, so you could spec 3 fire classes or get pyro/hydro/aero. Also speccing in multiple elements allows for special advanced classes. Steam mages from hydro/pyro vs something like pyro/pyro/pyro. Traits have a progress stat that can mean different things. For personality types it may need to hit a value for a one-off trait and for classes its like a level. So to be a just ruler you may need to get x points in justice at which point you get a relations bonus or something.

Aside from hybrid classing I wanted to make it so that it would be worth it to be a pyro/hydro combo without speccing to steam. Still working on various strategies.

You can get skills/spells separate from traits but generally traits/sub classes have rarer skills and good bonuses like the pyromancer's damage bonus.

Traits can be added to upgrades and are therefore usable in regular RTS. I am trying to maintain the ability to play a standard Glest/MG style RTS while putting in all the RPG stuff but I also want you to be able to use any feature you want rather than having a lot of limited game types.
Title: MEU: Skill Passing(Technical)
Post by: MoLAoS on 25 May 2013, 22:15:44
After a bit of work I've managed to enable a way to pass the same skill to several units with traits and I guess w/e else. It did piss off the checksum though. But anyways ridiculously multi-classed mages are now working great. All sorts of fun shenanigans. Making great progress.
Title: MEU Technical: Upgrades Grant Skills
Post by: MoLAoS on 28 May 2013, 01:39:52
You can now confer new skills with upgrades. The value here is mostly space saving, previously you could lock skills/commands with upgrades but now you can put those in the upgrades to make the unit less stuffy. Also you can confer the same skill to multiple unit types but only need to write the skill once in the upgrade.

The main value is that this system will allow the conferring of skills with numerous other methods now that some kinks are worked out.

Anyways I'm gonna try to work on some other stuff for a while. Gotta go check my list of stuff that I need to do.

I kinda wanna enable the player characters and customizable characters now but that's a lot of work. You can already create a template for your player character with the character creator, its just not possible to load currently.
Title: MEU: Character Creation Again
Post by: MoLAoS on 9 June 2013, 04:24:56
Back from my extensive CK2:TOG inspired break.

After some annoying hacks you can now load the whole tech tree into the character creator to load skills and shit. Necessary for loading traits and skills so that you can see what they do before you decide if you want them on your guy.

Should be able to finish off at least saving the portion of the player/special characters. Still cannot load them in game although traits are currently fully functioning and both traits and upgrades can pass around new skills to units if you use the appropriate model file names.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 11 March 2014, 20:07:21
Well, shit is going down in EVE, not much for me to do there. Did some work on the game.

Basically, educated citizens spawn given correct circumstances. They can be recruited by Orders to get new heroes. The standard RTS method of a produce unit command still works, this is a separate thing. Click the Recruit button, click the citizen you want, based on their special stats, they turn into the unit type that is the main type for the Order. They gain a trait based on the extra classes the Order supports. Their main type has access to more class features and determines their unit model and base stats. Other classes are added as traits with maybe 70-80% of class features, and don't affect the unit model although they may give SLIGHT stat bonuses. Mainly they provide new skills/spells, and new production/crafting abilities. It may also be that certain combinations provide new bonus features based on which classes are enabled. At least you will be able to add new classes through research based on currently enabled classes.

The special recruit units, and their conversion to their new type and their assignment to their new home are enabled. Multi classing works but there is not yet a way to add new traits/classes to a structure, although you can assign multiple traits in the XML, with the first one in the xml list being the main type.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 14 March 2014, 19:45:04
I've made some decent progress on the Order system. You can now recruit special units to Orders and when you research new classes they are automatically added to the units that belong to that Order. I was stymied for a bit because of code limitations and in the end I had to think outside the box and subvert the normal structure of CommandType. Sad times but nothing else to be done.

I'm considering working on a feature whereby individual Order members don't auto gain new stuff but merely now have the option to learn new things that the Order can teach after research. This might require a rather complex rewrite of some code though so I'll probably put it off till a later project.

Sadly stuff in EVE is not going well because nullsec pvp corps are ignorant of what really matters in EVE, so I've been distracted from programming as I try to work out a way for my plans to go forward.
Title: Destroy Building Button
Post by: MoLAoS on 31 March 2014, 04:02:45
I have added a button to destroy buildings. For specific tags it will kick out your units inside it first. I may just swap in a special tag for that, so that other tags have less stuff shoved together in one tag. Currently you do not get a return of resources. I'm considering making a harvestable object spawn that you need to carry resources from, rather than auto returning them. Although I could add the option for both.

Button is right near the top in the farthest right cell in the second row of the unit display interface. Have no idea why it took me so long to add such an obvious feature. Currently only units tagged as "building" can be destroyed this way.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: Tiel on 4 April 2014, 18:38:28
You're only releasing after you finish your game, right?
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 4 April 2014, 19:38:43
Quote from: Tiel on  4 April 2014, 18:38:28
You're only releasing after you finish your game, right?

Well, you can compile from GitHub which I mostly keep up to date. You'd have to read through code to find the XML for stuff since I had to close my webpage that had the Wiki due to financial problems, though.

Also, although I fix any bug I come across that doesn't mean there aren't any still there.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: tomreyn on 4 April 2014, 20:16:29
Have you considered to host your website on GitHub.io (using GitHub as a web page editor)? Or you could use the GitHub wiki - both options are free.
Title: Re: Mandate Update Thread
Post by: MoLAoS on 4 April 2014, 21:28:31
Accidentally hit modify instead of quote. Stupid mod tools. That's why it says I edited your post.

Quote from: tomreyn on  4 April 2014, 20:16:29
Have you considered to host your website on GitHub.io (using GitHub as a web page editor)? Or you could use the GitHub wiki - both options are free.

Yeah but I'd have to rewrite everything all over again. And only a few people ever message me or comment about the project. Since I really dislike writing XML its really not that tempting to rewrite the wiki pages.

Also I got a job so I have less free time. Not sure if I'll stay in the job though, its pretty mind numbing.
Title: Pet And Group Systems
Post by: MoLAoS on 12 June 2014, 21:01:05
crossposted from Bay12:

Well, I decided I wanted to try to get back into this, and in order to maintain motivation I'm going to try and add a large but important and fun feature, pets.

I'm going to utilize the AI behavior system to manage pets, rather than writing a whole new system. It should be simply enough to use a personality, aka a set of ai behaviors, to implement pets. I'm also adding a planned but not yet implemented behavior to facilitate this, the FOLLOW behavior. Most pets will be a combination of FOLLOW and DEFEND. I also want to implement a behavior called FOCUSFIRE which will be used by pets as well. That way pets won't have to wait for their owner to get attacked before being assigned a valid target and hopefully regular units can utilize this behavior also to work together, for the later implementation of "groups" or "parties".

There may be some need to modify the loading units into other units code to accommodate pets if their owners need to enter an Orderhall or a Guildhall or w/e, but otherwise it should all be handled by the MandateAI behavior system.

One major reason to work on this feature is so I can implement the Druid and Necromancer Magic Orders. Although other planned orders can either tech into pets or may have some limited ones already.