Messages

176

Mandate Engine / MEU: New Provisional Release

« 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.

177

General discussion / Re: Levelling and getting unit info

« on: 23 April 2013, 01:27:47 »

I didn't want to bring up GAE's activity or other engines but, since Omega already did it first, I implemented a system that meets most of the requirements of Omega's plan. On-hit and unit type based experience for levels as well as many other significant changes. Sadly its not back-compatible with GAE because I drastically modified the EnhancementType class that is used with levels. This will be available in the Provisional Release of Mandate.

178

Mandate Engine / MEU(Done): Skills With Levels

« 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.

179

Mandate Engine / MEU: Sovereign Creation Screen

« 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.

180

Mandate Engine / MEU: New Video

« 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:


The video is now uploaded fully to youtube. For the 50 total views it will get.

181

Mandate Engine / MEU: Boring Refactor

« 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.

182

General discussion / Re: 0.4 beta 3

« on: 15 April 2013, 00:42:16 »

Hailstone is theoretically working on new multiplayer, Yggdrasil is apparently only keeping the model importer up to date. AFAIK there haven't been any major updates to GAE in a while. Hailstone gets on occasionally so perhaps he has more detailed information.

183

Mandate Engine / MEU: Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!(Upgrades and Items Can Now Add Entirely New Abilities)

« 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.

184

General discussion / Re: Multiple attack commands and multiple morph commands

« on: 14 April 2013, 18:41:16 »

It would be trivially simple to assign hotkeys to different attacks. I will look into this if I have the time. This would probably not be back-ported to GAE though.

185

General discussion / Re: Multiple attack commands and multiple morph commands

« on: 14 April 2013, 17:38:37 »

Could you post the XML you are using? Archmages in the Magitech faction already have multiple attacks.

186

General discussion / Re: Profiling Information Regarding The Minimap

« on: 14 April 2013, 14:54:17 »

Did your profiling agree that the minimap was an issue?? I didn't check GAE and it was my first time using one. Also do you have any idea how to make the minimap more efficient aside from simply lessening the updates?

I feel kinda meh about doing that, because I feel like the original Glest team was made up of better programmers than me and they had a reason to make the minimap that way.

And did you find anything else that could be slowing the game down in GAE? I feel like my game has a lot of stuff like the AI that takes up time and could hide slowness elsewhere.

187

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Harvested Resources)

« 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.

188

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Markets)

« 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.

189

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Houses)

« 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.

190

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Guilds)

« 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.

191

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Books)

« 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.

192

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Lords)

« 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.

193

Mandate Engine / MEU: Gameplay Overview(Sovereign)

« 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.

194

Feature requests / Re: Suggestion: conquer enemy's building instead of burning them down

« on: 11 April 2013, 23:09:03 »

Perhaps you would care to elaborate instead of just saying that over and over. Have you even looked at the code?

195

Feature requests / Re: Suggestion: conquer enemy's building instead of burning them down

« on: 11 April 2013, 13:10:30 »

You are making this way more complicated than it needs to be. Also, being able to build a whole new faction is overrated. How many times do you see Toss players trying to push the zerg tree? Because of the way upgrades work its not actually useful to do that.

196

Feature requests / Re: Suggestion: conquer enemy's building instead of burning them down

« on: 10 April 2013, 18:35:58 »

Faction type is an artificial check. There wouldn't be a significant change required to have a faction control units of a different faction type.

Actually Softcoder and I were looking into a capture other units type thing a while ago and it not as easy as it seems.

Maybe your code is different. I have an option right now, working, to create units from other factions and have them create other things, assuming its a unit with a produce skill of course. As far as capturing specifically, I haven't tried directly changing the ownership of a unit, but you can kill a unit with no animation and have a new unit tied to the appropriate faction instantly appear, and if you want you could probably get it to have all its data set identically to the unit captured, health, energy, and so forth, although I didn't bother with that.

There is somewhat of an issue in that the faction/faction type/player system wasn't set up by the Glest team to be easily extensible to things like capturing. But gameplay logic is probably the easiest thing to handle in an engine.

197

Feature requests / Re: Suggestion: conquer enemy's building instead of burning them down

« on: 10 April 2013, 18:08:14 »

Faction type is an artificial check. There wouldn't be a significant change required to have a faction control units of a different faction type.

198

Mandate Engine / MEU: Skill Costs

« 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.

199

General discussion / Profiling Information Regarding The Minimap

« on: 6 April 2013, 15:12:37 »

According to Very Sleepy of the 50% or so CPU time taken up by the ::processFrame function, which itself is 50% of CPU time used, is in the minimap, particularly updateUnitTex. I have never fiddled with the minimap, but perhaps one of the GAE programmers is aware of this issue and why it happens. It seems weird that this function, for something as irrelevant as the minimap, is taking up 25% of CPU time, even after you factor in all the extra stuff that Mandate has in gameplay over GAE.

The more I refine my additional code the larger % of time taken up by the minimap. Its basically 40% of all time according to the profiler. Other significant time is spent mainly on the UI and my new AI. AI is 10%. UI is 10%.

I will probably fiddle around with the minimap code in a couple weeks to see what is up.

I just set the minimap to updateUnitTex every 20 frames instead of 5. Lag disappeared magically. Now minimap is about 10% of total time. And the difference honestly isn't very visible, the minimap is so low res anyways.

200

Forum discussion / Re: [Forum] The next step

« on: 1 April 2013, 03:44:11 »

I am not sure that Annex has a number of players large enough to justify its own forum. 47 Facebook likes, 88 IDB comments, not on sourceforge so now download count. Doesn't generate any forum activity.

Most sites don't really have a forum for each mod of the engine, mostly mods host their own forum if they get popular enough for it to be worth it, like Spring mods do. 0AD mods only get a subforum in the game modification forum.

I know my project has even less interest than Annex though, so I guess its not really up to me. The MG people can make a forum if they feel Annex deserves it.