If Lords of Midnight was funded using some form of crowd funding, what would you want from it?
What would be your enticement to donate some cash to the project and what would you expect to see in return?
We fought side-by-side on the Plains of Blood in the last war against Doomdark
Since the start of this project there has been an interesting issue with Doomdark’s armies reaching Blood too soon. I’d noticed it while playing, and the testers have brought it up more than a few times. I have checked the code, doubled checked the code, triple checked the code, and the fact is, there is absolutely no reason why Doomdark’s armies cannot reach Blood the first night.
There are two regiments that start the game at the keeps at the Gap of Valethor, lets call them regiments 100 and 101. These are both riders set to wander.
A wandering regiment has 6 turns in the night. Firstly it checks up to 3 locations away, if there is anything interesting between it and 3 locations, it will make 1 turn step toward it. If not, it will randomly pick a direction, and as long as it isn’t frozen wastes, make 1 turn step in that direction.
Movement costs depending on terrain and direction. eg: Cost is *2 turns for a warrior, and a mountain costs 4 turns. So a warrior walking out of a mountain will take 8 turns. You take the terrain cost from the terrain you are leaving not the one you are stepping into. So a warrior walking from plains into mountains will take 2 turns, leaving 4 turns. The next move will cost 8 turns, but the fact they only have 4 turns left, is not important, they take the move, but then have -ve turns left, and thus their processing ends.
The process will be repeated until the 6 turns have been exhausted.
Now regiment 100 starts at the keep directly north of Blood. If on its first move, it decides to move south, then that places it within 3 locations of Blood, which means the next turn will focus it on the stronghold, and therefore it will guaranty hitting Blood in the first night. A movement of southeast, or southwest, will reduce the chance that the regiment will hit Blood in the first night, but it is still a possibility.
So, the original AI for Lords of Midnight, makes it possible that Blood could be hit on the first night. But it hardly ever happened. On my version, it happened almost every time. And every time makes it impossible for you to recruit Lord Blood, let alone try and mount the Blood Defence.
I figured that the random number generator mustn’t be functioning, so tested that, double tested it, and then tested it again. It seemed to be giving a reasonable stream of numbers. Didn’t change the fact that the results I was getting were not desirable. So I considered placing a delay command on those regiments, just to slow them down.
Last night I was talking through the issue again with Mike and we decided to throw out the random routine, and use another one instead. He gave me the C code version of the one used in Midwinter. The results were the same! But then I noticed something. The random number functions generate a number between 0.0 and 1.0 And thus picking number between say 0 and 8 just involves multiplying 8 by the random number, and there was the problem. This number needed to be converted to an integer, a whole number, and it was being done with a cast to int. And this truncates, which means the number is ALWAYS rounded down. In theory it just means that in this instance, 8 would almost never be picked. And in the case of these wandering regiments, that just means losing Northwest. However, changing that one line of code in the random number generator, has put those wandering regiments, back on the right track.
Blood can still be hit, but it is hit much less often than before.
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Is not the Citadel of Ithrorn still free?
It was time, thought Luxor…
“Luxor stood at the doorway of the hut. gazing into the white gloom of the forest. A thin scatter of ersh, the fine powder-snow of the new moon, was floating down onto the frozen ground. It was time, thought Luxor, it was time. An icicle of fear touched him and shivered through him. He drew his cloak tightly around himself, as though it would warm the chill in his heart, and turned from the forest.”
This week we started doing some early tests. A number of people have signed up for the test process and are putting the game through its paces. For that I am very grateful. At this stage, what this allows is for me to iron out some of the obvious bugs and make sure the game is actually feature complete as per the original. It also allows me to take feedback from players and get an idea of some of the directions that we should take the User Interface.
The iPad is a very different beast from the 8bit computers that Lords of Midnight was originally developed for. It is also a very different beast from the Windows machines that I developed WinLom and the Midnight Engine on. Therefore, it’s only when you start playing the game on the actual device that you get a feel for how the game should and should not play. I’m already starting to question some of the assumptions that I had made about the direction of the UI.
Over the next few weeks as the game starts to settle, I will be one by one addressing particular areas of the game. For example, I might spend a couple of weeks really drilling down on the in game map. So over that period all builds will be addressing new functionality or tweaking existing functionality in that part of the game. The the following couple of weeks, I will focus on a new area.
There are already so many great suggestions coming in that I’m not sure I will have the time to implement everything. But one thing is for sure, the more this project goes on, the more exiting I get about the pending release…
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Lords of Midnight – Update
I finished some work on the character select screen last night, which means that that is now good to go. I also built a version that was uploaded to my iPad, which means we are back up and running on the device. This has been sent to our potential artists for them to look at. It also means I have a test to see if we can get the app out to other testers…
I now just have the load & save screen to be implemented before we are green light on functional testing. That is, test the game for gameplay issues. You should be able to fully play the game through on the iPad. This is prior to some new features and the relevant eye candy changes, not to mention final graphics. But it should allow me to check for device and porting issues.
Once the iPad test version goes out I will spend a little time making sure I have dealt with the iPhone4(s) and prior. This is mainly an asset issue and dealing with different resolutions.
After this I will likely make a Windows and OSX version available for testing. Again this is to just increase the scope of gameplay testing, and not necessarily to focus on what a desktop version would look like.
I will spend a little time on an Android tablet version and Playbook version. I will not be looking at Android handsets during this phase.
I am now hoping to be ready to start pushing test versions out from the end of this month.
We have a collective of artists potentially prepared to work on the game, which means we can start honing in on the visual requirements of the game. I can hopefully announce more about that in the coming weeks.