Some Discovery Changes, and "Glaciers"

What a weekend. Thanks to a very funny video by GrayStillPlays that shocases many of the features (and shortcomings) of the game, I got an unexpected amount of attention from the internet and a lot of new followers. It was both amazing and scary at the same time, but things have calmed down quite a bit and I think I can now return to my normal work-weekend routine.

The "Drainage Basins and Rivers" feature is pretty much complete for this release. I tried tweaking the fishing activity to make it more permissible on high drainage areas, but I ran into several complexities that I didn't think I could solve in a couple of hours. So I'm going to leave fishing activity related improvements for a later version of the game. Instead of that I decided to introduce quasi-glaciers by allowing water flows to "carry" temperature with them. So tiles that receive water from other colder tiles will get cooled down a little bit (and vice-versa). This has the side effect of making snowy biomes extend somewhat downhill by following drainage patterns, giving the illusion of glaciers extending beyond mountain ice caps. These are not actual glaciers though since they behave just like regular rivers... At some point I'll have to revisit drainage basins to add more realistic glacial flows among other things.

I also spent quite a bit of time redesigning some discovery conditions and factors. For starters, I added a condition related to water flows so that now certain discoveries can be tied to the presence of drainage basins. In addition to that, I rewrote a bunch of biome related conditions so that they are no longer hard-coded to specific biome types. For example, there's no longer a sea presence related condition. Instead, the boat-making discovery now has a cell_biome_type_presence condition that requires that at least one biome of a specific type is present (in this case "water" type biomes, like rivers and seas) on the cell. So now it is possible to create discoveries that might require the specific presence of "land" biomes or "ice" biomes, not just "water" ones. Though, for now, the list of valid biome types will be limited to just those three.

In addition to that, I added a cell_biome_trait_presence condition which looks for biomes with specific traits like, for example, "wood", or "sea". Unlike the biome type filter condition, these trait values are completely mod defined. Which means modders will be able to introduce their own traits into the game. Also, unlike biome types, a biome can have more than one trait at the same time, which will allow for interesting trait mixes within a single biome.

Just to give an example of both biome types and biome traits, here are two biome definitions that defined with the latest mod format:



{

"id": "sea",

"name": "sea",

"color": "#1C4254",

"type": "water",

"traits": ["sea"],

"maxAltitude": 0,

"minTemperature": -15,

"survivability": 0.0,

"foragingCapacity": 0.0,

"accessibility": 0.0,

"arability": 0.0

},

{

"id": "forest",

"name": "forest",

"color": "#4C8437",

"type": "land",

"traits": ["wood"],

"minAltitude": 0,

"minRainfall": 1375,

"maxRainfall": 2975,

"minFlowingWater": 1375,

"maxFlowingWater": 2975,

"minTemperature": -10,

"survivability": 0.4,

"foragingCapacity": 0.5,

"accessibility": 0.6,

"arability": 0.3

},

Of these, only the "sea" trait is actually hard-coded into the game (though that's going to change eventually). The "wood" trait on the other will only be used in discoveries and other properties defined fully within mods. You'll also notice there are two new biome presence limiters, minFlowingWater and maxFlowingWater. These work pretty much in the same way as minRainfall and maxRainfall. Except they are tied to the presence of flowing water that drains from neighboring cells instead of falling from the skies. The rainfall and flowing water limiters are not exclusive to each other, which means that even if the rainfall in a single cell is not enough to support a biome, if the flowing water value is within range, then that biome will be present, given all other presence limiters are also within range. The same will also happen with the reverse situation (not enough flowing water but enough rainfall).

...

So, I have still to work through some odds and ends related to the game interface that I left half-done for this release, and which I hope to complete next week. But beyond that I'm going to start going through the list of pending issues and bugs that I have to solve for 0.3.3 as soon as possible. As of this moment, the list has twenty high priority issues. Some of them will get solved rather quickly. Some others might require more than a day or two of work to be handled. In any case. My goal is to get the release ready for the first week of November. Though I don't want to promise anything given the chaotic nature of game development and the fact that I originally expected this version to be completed more than two months ago... sorry about that.