We figured out what those Cultists have been building in the woods all this time! Yes it’s-

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

Major player-facing additions this month Building quality mechanics! Add decor to make your workshops & houses more pleasant (or don’t!)

Revamped military AI! Soldiers will consistantly rally and follow orders with our newer, stronger AI infrastructure

Haunting Spectres! They’re spooky.

Additional opportunities for madness and the occult!

Point lights! Bring some cheer to those dark, creepy nights.

Enhanced murder.

Character memories have been cleaned up, extended, and given a longer-term record in the character UI.

(Continuing work on Secret Things, deep and dark.) Alpha 45 Full Changelog (non-annotated, for annotated version go here)

Engine, misc

FIXED: OS X crashes when cancelling assignment via assignment beacon

FIXED: OS X crashes when crops are finished being harvested

FIXED: some leaking memory (what a mess!)

replaced dynamic allocations for moving tags about in the game space dictionary with a static pool of memory and a large buffer

replaced dynamic allocations of particle system VBOs and memory during the render frame with a pool of VBO resources to draw from; eliminates a memory leak and General Badness with drivers that do not like you creating/deleting VBOs on the fly all that much, and should also provide a modest speed increase.

Save/Load

FIXED: Display of work schedule data is no longer reset on load.

FIXED: environmental light values now set correctly after save/load

Combat AI / Decision Tree

added a bunch more code to the decision tree parser, specifically “enough code to make it work” and “enough code to unbreak the editor.”

replaced all old military logic with military decision tree code (it is smarter! also: should fix rallying)

FIXED: require_work_party_rally_point not firing consistently

Renderer / Lighting Rewrite

added dynamic point lights! they can be attached to a model placer for rigid body and skeletal models

lights can now be attached to/removed from placers; UPM version 2.9 created

the renderer now applies interior ambient lighting for objects inside buildings, and tracks it on the interior

renderer now does lighting in a completely different way for the two existing lights, but this will probably be invisible to the user. It is, however, necessary for everything else.

things can now cast shadows on farms (and other decal-type zones)

increased transparency of semi-transparent building walls.

Spectres

added Haunting Spectres

added Vengeful Spectres

added job for Vicar to confront spectre (+ticker message is created when vicar confronts spectre)

added spectre report event (spectres can be reported once per night)

Building Quality / Workshops

added Building Quality system! You will now have to balance the ratio of work modules to decor in your buildings. Nicer buildings mean happier colonists!

and added building quality display on UI for workshops/houses

buildings now robustly track modules they contain.

added 14 new decor modules

appropriate decor has been added to all buildings’ default module lists

many modules have been renamed

many modules have new descriptions

performed reorganization of our workshop edb to be actually legible

added icons for mounted aurochs/rhino heads

balance: build costs on all decor have been adjusted

FIXED: orientation/placement on a number of previously unused models

FIXED: script error when building clotheslines

FIXED: issue w/ some decor modules not deconstructing correctly

FIXED: footprint size on carpets

Madness

balance: added various eldritch means which help sustain madness levels

added evil book prop

added madness sustaining memory creation for colonists w/ cult_seed tag

added madness-sustaining effect for colonists w/ occult_mark_black_magic

made vermin corpses last longer to encourage Beetle Curses

Increased weighting on many madness jobs

balance: contact with Obeliskians made slightly more maddening & for longer (due to rarity)

FIXED: rare scripterror when attempting to spawn eldritch artifact

Cults

added ability to order shrines destroyed

added attack_object_until_destroyed.fsm

cultists will become upset if your order shrines destroyed, especially at whoever destroyed the shrine

balance: slightly increased chance to perform cult recruitment

added cultist madness-sustaining memories + new icons for some of them

balance: many more experiences can now trigger “cult seed” depending on character traits

balance: more strange/terrible events may now provoke cult formation

FIXED: possible error cases when cultist leader dies

FIXED: cult leadership now transitions correctly when leader dies

FIXED: cult group ending due to lack of sufficiently enthusiastic leadership scripterror

FIXED: cultist preaching was pushing memory to wrong party in conversation

Offices (Chapel, Pub, Barber)

Pub jobs cleaned up to be vastly more efficient at actually stocking and serving drinks

Barber/Pub/Chapel: if a colonist seeks treatment/confession/a pint of beer and can’t find a barber/vicar/pub worker nearby, they will abort waiting and create an alert

cleaned up confession fsm to not be a huge mess, and thus

FIXED: vicars giving confession will no longer permanently paralyze colonists

Religion

colonists will now pray at wall shrines

added access point to wall shrines

made praying at wall shrines something both Spiritually Inclined and Staunch Traditionalists can do

Murder

made significant improvements to how colonists decide to engage in murder

added Beetle Curse (murder)

added Tree Curse (murder)

added Occult Murder witnessed event

killing someone for the first time will now record their name in the memory

cleaned up memories for killing and killing memory creation

FIXED: murder due to hunger

Death

balance: corpses will only spawn vermin after being left out for a day

made a ForceDropEverything receiver in ai_agent.go which drops every damn thing being held; all agents now call this upon death

as such, removed a bunch of extra ForceDropTools calls from all the agent scripts

therefore FIXED: commodity drops upon character death

corpses will now only reset their burial job at sunrise rather than every 10 seconds (it was spammy)

Memories & Character

can now query LEQ or GEQ on happy, sad, angry, fearful (for internal scripting)

did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go

cleanup: moved creation of building quality memories into citizen.go

cleaned up defs for bunch of data back-end for memory events

balance: tweaked many some memory descriptions & values

did an audit of all memory icons and changed/updated/fixed where necessary

memories will now use greater range in icons

re-added conscription/de-conscription memories

cleaned up more food memories

cleaned up immigrant & bandit seed memories

re-jiggered all damage/murder memories & frontier justicing & murder witnessing

reworked food memory creation to more cleanly use makeMemory function

did more memory creation cleanup in citizen.go; changed lots of previously hardcoded memory values to read from histories.edb

cleanup: removed a bunch of memory creation / justice tagging from ai_damage.go and put it in citizen.go where it belongs

FIXED: minor starvation scripterror in citizen.go

FIXED: some memories were not being triggered correctly

FIXED: some more broken memory creation logic

FIXED: some broken memory icons

FIXED: some broken icons in thoughticons.xml

UI Misc

removed all UI filters for military crews except for hunting (Hauling is not a suitable job for the brave troops of Her Majesty’s 40th Civil Engineering Brigade)

re-added friendship ticker notification

stockpile UI edited for better usability

added new code hooks for building UI windows

new Office UI code refactored to apply generally to all buildings

did framework code for skill progression info on character.

did fixes to various minor bugs in UI element sizing

did fix to tooltip searching in UI code

did fixes to icon -> tag lookup table

made gabions log warning refer to “logs” rather than “timber” and say it may be a range problem

polished up some icons, added some other new icons. Just a good bunch of icons.

FIXED: was possible to order dissection of an Obeliskians more than once on the same specimen

FIXED: various crashes in character info panel, hopefully without breaking anything

FIXED: various broken icons

Typos

fixed various event typos

fixed typo in memories

FIXED: various typos & grammar (farm text, immigration event)

FIXED: various typos

Events, MISC

audited and improved spawn locations for all fishperson events

added one-time bailout event if you have more workers than you can allocate to all of your overseers

below 3 chars bailout only gives overseers now and is somewhat rewritten

some events have been given more detailed descriptions for number of ai agents involved

doubled timeout length for all events

updated job filters tutorial

contextual tutorials will no longer fire if the main tutorial is still going

balance: reduced max bandits that major bandit attack can send

FIXED: scripterror in certain decision case of “Colonists Denounce Cowardice Vs Bandits”

MISC

Small code cleanup to Colonists Denounce Cowardice

increased log search range for half-size gabions (it was super low)

hunger incrementing moved to evening instead of night

balance: fishpeople made less likely to turn murderous when intimidated by soldiers

FIXED: aborting a “Gather Building Materials” job due to an explosive injury would put the job in the wrong assignment, causing it to be completed infinitely

FIXED: “isObjectInRadiusWithTagReverseMustOwnTwoTags” function never checked the second tag

????

added Grape Vine crop (commented out)

added Wine commodity & production (commented out)

drew grapes + wine icons, attached to commodities (commented out)

re-added poetic memories to use hearExclamation (Poets just don’t spawn right now)

cleaned up some junk code from bandit.go

started some defs for Obeliskian tech/commodities

adding infrastructure for obeliskian forge (not fully implemented)

added Nicholas’s new Arcane Symbols to the documentation on spacial maps (I have no idea what this means)

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong!