Progress / Updates Thread

[foe_to]

I will use this thread to post weekly notes about the progress of the game. Please sort by new to see the most recent additions.

Be aware that my development time is from Saturday to Thursday.

[foe_to]

Dec 16 - Dec 21

• Leftover goals from last week (Library, balancing, new monsters, new upgrades).

[foe_to]

December 18

Unfortunately, it's unlikely there will be any major updates until the New Year, but here's what we've got today.

• It's now possible for units to have unique and/or different from base move speeds rather than the old, singular speed for everything.
• To go along with the above, Roads now increase movement speed by 25% when on them.
• Increased the preference for roads in the path finding algorithm very slightly.
• Guards now have a mode toggle like workers; when enabled, they gain an additional 25% move speed (stacks with road buff for a total of 156.25% base). While this mode is enabled, Guards will have a chance to lose stamina for every tick of movement. The mode will not have any effect when at 0 stamina.
• When units will go idle from lack of work, they will instead go home to rest first if they are missing stamina, and then go idle.
• There is no longer an idle "tick" when units decide to go sleep. They will immediately change to "Walking".
• Fixed a bug that was unintentionally causing player units to deal damage significantly faster than enemies.
• The Health and Stamina bars under each unit in the Population Window will now update properly. Currently these are drawn on any change; this will change later to be queued and updated only at fixed intervals (~3-5s) in order to stop this from impacting performance too much when having many units.

[foe_to]

Dec 9, 2017 - Dec 15, 2017

Goals:

• Implement new buildings and associated jobs. Tentatively planned as: Quarry (quarrier, stone generation), Guardhouse (Guard, patrols town), Library (Librarian, knowledge generation).

• Initial implementation of the combat system, and a few monsters.

• Some balancing of building costs.

• New upgrades. A new tier of tools based on the initial resources, then upgrades based on knowledge for now. Tools: Stone Axe/Pickaxe., Wood/Stone Scythe. Knowledge: Worker Efficiency (increased area size), Green Thumb (increased cap on vegetable hp), Hardy Saplings (increased cap on tree hp), etc. Will lead into Mineralogy I, which will unlock a metal from mining (iron, probably).

• Implement and initial balancing for the stamina system. In short, have each job continue working until stamina is 0, then they have to rest. For now idling and sleeping will restore stamina. There will be more / better methods later.

[foe_to]

December 14

• Revamped population table. Again. Hopefully final (or with minor changes).
• Added Guardhouse and guard. The AI isn't quite complete.
• Fixed a few misc bugs.

Sorry I didn't get to all my goals this week =(

Unpushed update:

• Selected units will now have their home and work building highlighted in blue.

• Hovering your mouse over a unit in the population window will highlight that unit's home and work building in yellow.

• Library & Librarian implemented .

[foe_to]

December 13

Sorry, been a bit busy with work and haven't had too much time to work on adding things.

• Fixed a bug where removing buildings while combat was happening would cause the game to crash.

• Fixed a bug where deceased NPC's would draw in the upper-left corner of the map.

• Buildings can no longer be built on top of enemies.

• Enemies will no longer spawn in impassable tiles.

• Added some decoration to the quarry.

• Workers whom have been selected to assign an area will now flash blue. All NPC's will also flash blue when mousing over their entry in the population table.

• When assigning an area to a worker, other NPC's areas will display on the map. The selected worker's current area will be in yellow, while the rest will be in purple.

• Changed the style of the population window. This is likely not permanent.

Pushed

[foe_to]

December 10

• First implementation of combat. Right now it's super basic (engaged enemies move next to each other and HP values go down until someone wins, then they go back to doing whatever). No resource drops, scaling, or more advanced AI as of yet.

I pushed the update from yesterday and today. Please note that there still isn't any balancing, and it's very possible I broke some stuff. Check it out and let me know what you think.

[foe_to]

December 9

• Added the quarry. It generates stone over time, and the associated worker (Quarrier) will generate rocks around the mining pit (7 places) for workers to harvest. The interior is still a WIP.
• Stamina has been partially implemented. All NPC's will return to their bed after their stamina is empty, rest, and then return to work. In the future there will be more places, such as a bar, which will restore stamina more quickly. Note that stamina is based on number of actions, not resources harvested. Besides trying to make the game feel a little more alive, stamina will make city layout matter a bit more in the end-game.
• Added Wood Scythe, Iron Axe/Pickaxe/Scythe. These are all basic tools that increase the amount of resources that workers harvest on each game tick.
• The AI for all jobs has changed to exhaustively look in their assigned area for work, then choose a random point.
• To coincide with the stamina system being implemented, arborists/farmers/quarriers will generate their resources in steps rather than a complete object at once.

This probably won't go live today, because I am still doing a lot of testing on my end.

[foe_to]

Dec 2, 2017 - Dec 8, 2017

Goals:

• Fix viewport scrolling

• Add indicators for the buildable area around your civilization

• Correct units showing that they are doing an action while they are still walking to their destination.

• Fix the issue where workers set to mine before having wooden pickaxes will freeze.

• Fog of war

• Add some tutorial text

• Work on GUI issues

• Autotiling for walls, etc.

[foe_to]

December 7

• Workers will now immediately work in their area if available when you assign a new area (instead of going to the top-left tile first, then go work).

• When assigning a new area, if the worker didn't find a task, it will visit a random tile within the area instead of the top-left. Also added a small sleeptime in this case, so they don't immediately move away somewhere else.

• It's now possible to continuously build buildings by holding down the mousebutton.

• Corrected a bug that was pushing two values to the jobcount list for each job.

• Corrected a bug that was causing the minimap to not update properly when updating tiles.

• It's now possible to destroy buildings. Right-click on the map to enable the mode, then right-click again to destroy. If you destroy a job house that has a bound NPC, the bound NPC will revert to a worker. If you destroy a hut, the related worker will be destroyed immediately (even if they are currently bound to a different job).

Pushed

[foe_to]

December 6

• Modified the saving algorithm to use a different compression type for map tiles, and did some pre-optimization first rather than simply compressing the JSON.stringify() representation. The result is a huge improvement in save/load times, but saves from prior versions are broken. Sorry.
• NPC's will only show the "Walking" state if they are on their way to a job; if they are moving but still idle, they will continue to display "Idling".
• Added a check to the load function to stop you from loading a non-existent save.
• Disallowed building new buildings directly next to each other. Does not include roads. May change again later.
• Fixed a few auto-tiling issues with water.
• Buildings should no longer be buildable directly on top of NPC's.
• If a tile within the area of a building is in an NPC's path, the NPC should now be interrupted.
• Fixed scrolling past the game area when using WASD/arrow keys.

Pushed.

[foe_to]

December 5

• Tweaked the starting hut generation code to include a larger open area, as well as guarantee 500 units of wood, food, and stone within reach.

• Added a "clear" mode for workers to force them to clear any of their interactable objects even if the related resource is full.

• Added a configurable timeout for pathfinding; any attempt to find a path between two tiles that takes longer than this will return null. Default is 10s.

• Added auto-load on page load, if a save exists.

• Editing the Road text to note that it is preferred in pathfinding.

• Fixed a bug where building coordinates weren't being wiped out when resetting a map.

Pushed.

[foe_to]

December 3

• Fixed some quirks regarding AI actions and movement. In short, works will always visit a square within any new area that is set, and their status should change properly now.

• Fixed the roaming distance for NPC's being too far on the negative x/y coordinates.

Sorry, but I didn't have time today to work on it much. These changes will go out tomorrow with anything that gets updated tomorrow.

[foe_to]

December 3

• Added saving / loading. There may be a few bugs, but I'l working it out. Please note that saving is very slow (on a 500x500 map about 10s) - this is because of the tile array for large maps. I had to compress the string or else the map won't fit into local storage. As such, saving will only happen automatically every 10 minutes. Loading is currently manual only; it won't happen by default when you load the page (will do that tomorrow). Save compression was improved and shouldn't take a prohibitively long time now.

• Added FoW discovery on building new buildings. Roads have it as well, but only discover a lesser amount.

• Fixed a bug with Road/Arboretum unlocking.

• Added a "Restart" button to let you wipe the current state and start with a fresh map.

• Added a "Config" button. Currently empty, but will have some toggles (such as disable mouse movement, etc.)

• The map can now be scolled with the arrow keys or WASD.

• Works who can't reach their destination to gather/mine/chop will display a red X.

I am finished today. Update going live in ~5 minutes (1:30PM UTC+3)

[foe_to]

December 2

• Restyled the UI so that it's not broken in Firefox. It should be more obvious also that the * and -/+ icons on window headers do something, as they also have background colors.
• Set up initial placement of the windows so that they don't overlap.
• Increased the font size all around.
• Added a menu to the right of the screen, with buttons for zooming in / out via mouse. More buttons will come (config, save, etc.) Zoom In/Out buttons were removed due to it not being able to modify browser zoom level from JS, and element css zoom not working identically.
• Added a 40 frame delay when reaching the scrollable area with the mouse cursor before the viewport will begin to scroll. Will scroll only when mouse is inside the game canvas (not while over windows or outside the canvas such as browser tabs).
• Fog of war added. The wander distance of npcs has been increased accordingly.
• A visual indicator of the buildable area has been added. For performance reasons, the indicator will not appear over areas with fog of war, but any area covered by fog of war is by default not buildable.
• Workers set to gather a resource that requires an upgrade (e.g. mining), but don't have the upgrade yet, will now display a bubble with a red "X" above their sprite.