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Scattered remarks of pausable items and core functions
Oh yes, there's been decent workflow going on in september. And some rainy days too, which always increase the coding endurance.  Here are some brief remarks and additional details to where we were at with the earlier posts from the late summer. The main work remains the same, transition to pausable item crafting. At this point majority of the Make menu item categories are now pausable. If all goes well, only clothes and transport categories will still persists in to-do non-pausable stage upon release of the next version. The upcoming tree species based timber is now in effect with the applicable craftable items and specific tree species is occasionally preferred, or sometimes even required. This brings in a whole new approach to acquiring timber and item crafting. To give a few examples birch tree is preferred for making wooden shovels, cups and bowls. For wood slats pine is preferred, and shingles need to be made exclusively from blocks of pine. For crafting a paddle spruce is required. And the bows are best made out of pine or birch. The tree species preference is indicated within the material and tool selection dialog the same way as all the other preferences. In the screenshot below you'll see how it goes when longbow crafting is initiated:  In cases where certain tree species is preferred it's still possible to use material of any tree species, but if it differs from the preferred types the quality of the produced item will be lower. In that case the generic "...can't make good out of bad." message will be shown upon obtaining the finished craft. .. As we undergo transition to pausable crafting many item recipes go through adjustments and additions. Recently we introduced raw material yield property, which is also available for modding as [yield:num]. This property defines how many crafted items a certain raw material can yield. It's in use for example with making staves, so that you can make three staves out of one slender tree trunk. The yield information is now also indicated upon starting to craft something, and before selecting the desired number of items to craft. This way crafting can be planned sparingly. In the screenshot below you'll see the slender trunk yield indicated when staff crafting is initiated:  It's likely that the crafts that are currently made in batches will be checked for possible use of the yield property to make their crafting more informative and intuitive. The yield property is not practical for all the items, but in cases where you are kind of asked for "how many batches of items that are made eg. 5 items in one go" it can help to simplify things to quite an extent. With all the new properties and tags and preference specifications we've had to touch the very core functions of item crafting that lay deep within the game. It's been quite unnerving to open these functions up for tweaking as if we make mistakes there the whole game will suffer from the consequences. Thus, we've led easy paced and precise coding and testing periods with these. So far, so good. So let's continue. These are future features - not yet functional in current version 3.84. September 13, 2024, 05:29:16 PM |
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Ancient Savo 0.9.01 released
Ancient Savo version 0.9.01 is now available on Steam and at Itch.io Establish your homestead in pristine woodlands. Farm, forage, fish and hunt for food. Craft tools and items, barter supplies. Get married, raise children. Teach your kids the skills of self-sufficient life - some skills like iron working are so complex that it might take multiple generations of accumulated experience to learn the secrets of the craft. Send you adult offspring to start homestead of your own. Once your family tree has more than one unit, you can freely switch game focus, choosing which family to play as. Or, if your family happens to die, you can continue playing as another family of your clan. There are no combat elements; cold, hunger and accidents are your main enemies. The game is designed to be moddable by editing XML files. This allows not only adding new items, terrain types and tasks, but also modifying the existing ones to add new attributes to any existing element. A modding tutorial is planned, and will be published once I have time for that. September 20, 2024, 12:51:22 PM |
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Re: Question about the game
At the moment bowls and mugs don't have that much use - I didn't have enough time to fully implement the functionality before hitting the deadline for Steam release. The plan is that jars (and wooden containers, to be added) should affect the storage of crops. I'm not yet entirely sure what would be the actual impact of mugs and bowls; probably something like not having them would make their life more unpleasant. (There is a hidden variable simulating how satisfied they are with their lives, that has a subtle effect on things like recovering from ailments etc) Also, high quality clayware will have good barter value. But this is also something not yet fully implemented. What comes to cauldrons, they do have a real impact on the simulation. Lacking a cauldron (or, having too small a cauldron relative to mouths to feed) means that all cooking must be roasting or other such methods, so cooking takes longer. With a proper cauldron it is easier and less time consuming to prepare stews to feed the family. If the cooking is being hampered due to lack of a cauldron, I think there is some feedback about that in the info for cooking routine - but sure, the UI could be more intuitive, so I still need to think about ways to make the relevant information easier to spot, without constantly spamming too much pop-up dialogs all the time everywhere... September 25, 2024, 09:16:20 PM |
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Ancient Savo, another Enormous Elk title released on Steam
Some of you are aware of this already, and for the rest it's time for a little cross-promotion... Ancient Savo, another game by Enormous Elk was recently on Steam. Created by Erkka Lehmus (UnReal World co-designer) this open-ended survival and resource management game is focused on raising a family. The game takes place in 1200 CE Eastern Finland, in the pristine woodlands of a region called Savo. If you have played UnReal World you may notice some familiar elements there, drawn from the same pool of inspiration, but Ancient Savo is an independent game its own. Maybe you'd better go see yourself, the introductory sale is on until 30th of September: Ancient Savo on Steam Ancient Savo trailer on YouTube Ancient Savo is being developed independently and aside from the UnReal World, and the route the Enormous Elk's flagship is sailing remains the same - as does the crew. A few screenshots from Ancient Savo:    Cheers! September 27, 2024, 04:48:27 PM |
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Pausable tying equipment and a few hiccups, twists and tweaks
As mentioned earlier, proceeding with the pausable crafting requires many kind of changes to the delicate core functions of the crafting system. As feared earlier, mistakes or faulty code within these core functions might bring the whole crafting system into a state of malfunction. And quite recently we experienced that as several batch production multipliers stopped working and the whole system kind of went out of order. Luckily it didn't take too long to get things back in order, but it was a good reminder to continue paying careful attention to this transition and to proceed piece by piece, category by category. When the hiccups started we were in the middle of converting crafting of the items in "textilecraft" and "tying equipment" categories into pausable crafting system. That is now accomplished, and next we'll move into converting crafting of the items in fishing category into pausable system. When it's done, I think it would be best to start wrapping up things for a release. With pausable tying equipment we had to allow a certain exception to the rule of continuing the paused craft. To continue paused tying equipment crafting you use any similar type of crafting again - ie. any cord, rope or withe - standing beside the partially finished item. So, even if you had eg. paused leather rope in the making trying to craft eg. birch-bark rope beside it continues the original paused craft. So, if you choose to craft any type of cord, rope or withe the existing paused cord, rope or withe at the location will be finished first. This is because comparing the item name to the recipe item name isn't as straightforward as we can have things like "Nettle cord" or "Mixed cord" etc. to be produced with "Cord" recipe. And so on. Having it work like this can be slightly confusing, but hopefully still tolerable. If not, we'll see about adding more complex comparison routines in the future versions. And as we proceed, some new modding tags/properties will be also added as necessary. Now there will be a new [sucmodqty] item header tag to specificy success modified quantity of obtained items. Using [sucmodqty] modifies the number of items to produce, specified as (num), based on how the crafting attempt succeeded. Very succesfull crafting produces close to or exactly the specified number of items, and failures produce that much less. This kind of system is already in use with some hardcoded crafts but now it becomes also a modding feature, and for starters will be in use at least with wood slats and shingles. As an example, if we had an item header like this: .Club. (10) /5h/ *COMMON* [sucmodqty] This would always produce 10 clubs if there wasn't [sucmodqty] in use. But now as there's [sucmodqty] tag it can produce something like 7-10 clubs based on how the crafting attempt succeeds. These are future features, not yet function in current version 3.84.2 October 03, 2024, 04:15:31 PM |
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Beta release of version 3.85 expected this month
Yep. We're now working on to be able to release version 3.85 as a beta version this month. Recent playtesting has been succesful with no serious setbacks. Stay tuned, keep your thumbs up. October 23, 2024, 01:31:50 PM |
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Re: Version 3.85 beta released
I'm a bit puzzled by the removal of the water skin. While it's true there's a lot of water in the world, it's rather inconvenient to get at during the winter. A water skin kept close to the body should keep it liquid, so you don't have to spend a lot of time making a hole in ice each time you need water. It would be fine if there was a corresponding closed container, such as a wooden flask, but now you'd have to resort to using an open container, which works in the game, but not in the real world. You'd have to move extremely carefully to retain the water inside a bowl in the backpack... October 29, 2024, 11:04:24 AM |
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Re: Version 3.85 beta released
I think most of us are in favour of keeping skins. We're for skins.  October 29, 2024, 07:30:56 PM |
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Bioluminescent mushrooms and wood
Hey! I want to suggest content expansion in a form of bioluminescent fungi. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0em0Czk0eQo recently caught my eye and while video itself is in Polish language, at 17:25 there is a fragment with prolonged exposure of how it looks. What I’m talking about is Armillaria mellea or possibly in a case of the north Armillaria borealis. In video it is said that mycelium of those species can span area as big as 37 hectares in Europe and almost 1000 in America. Assuming 1000 hectares, given its growth rate, it would be as old as 10 000 years. I think it’s safe to say that such species were present 1000 years ago. On top of that, there were legends of glowing trees and mushrooms until in XVIII century it was proven that timber supporting mine shafts indeed can glow in the dark. So what I suggest is: - Areas infected with Armillaria, where glowing wood could be found. Finding such area may not be so obvious considering bark need to be removed first and not all trees are infected. Possibly it could be harvested and reused by players to create some form of lantern posts. I assume it won’t glow very bright, but probably enough to create orientation spots? - Maybe some quest involving finding such area? I think there are very clever ideas that could take place here, but I don't want to spoil the fun. I think it would be a perfect fit for a game’s theme, where almost magical phenomena from legends comes true. Most of the information contained in this post is based on the video (again sorry for language restriction), though I’ve been doing some research to check if this information is correct. If idea catches I can help find specific references on this topic. I understand that such expansion may not sound as most pressing. I believe though that it's better to have more ideas/options than less. November 27, 2024, 07:32:20 PM |
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Re: Reducing amount of blunt hits enough to kill prey
Sometimes forest reindeer take 20-30 blunt skull hits. Realistic? No, but take it as AXE skill practice (as long as you’ve not got +3 on the skill that day, it’s all ‘progress’) December 02, 2024, 06:49:22 AM |
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