September's Story
It's the first Saturday of a new month, so let's review what happened in the previous one. Today's post may be a bit shorter than usual. I've been a bit under the weather, but want to make sure to get something out anyway.
A lot of time was spent working on the simulation of AI kingdoms. I'm fairly satisfied with how things work inside the player's kingdom, but there are still a number of things that need to happen for the non-player kingdoms. Using the same rules where possible is of course something I want to do, however, for example, the economic simulation assumes you're going to be getting a few negative treasury events in the course of the year. This has to be controlled for, otherwise the AIs become unreasonably wealthy.
There are lots of things like this that needed, and still need, work. Unfortunately this stuff makes horrible screenshots.
Screenshots are something I've been struggling with. This is ultimately a visual medium, but I've been doing some work that just doesn't work with that. So I consciously took a bit of time last month to improve some things I could show off for this post!
Rubrication was a process in which certain letters or words in manuscripts were emphasized, usually with the addition of red ink. There are a number of historically-attested methods of doing this: red letters, initial-strokes, and even patterns of dots. Thus far Dei Gratia Rex has used red letters because that was simple. However, given that it was more common for this sort of thing, I've switched over to using initial-strokes.
Each stroke is actually slightly customized per letter. Further, there's some randomization going on to make each stroke ever so slightly different in terms of length, width, and curvature — as one would expect from a scribal hand. It is a very subtle effect; without pointing it out I wonder if it would even be noticed. That said, I do feel that a lot of little touches like this, even if not fully grasped at first, contribute to the medieval feel of the overall work. Here is some example text at normal and 4x magnification:
Numbers have thus far played a bit of havoc with text layout to the point that I wrote out number words in the main text more often than not. I decided to find a similar font with numerals that played a bit nicer. These new numerals don't, for example, have long descending sevens. This might actually be less authentically medieval, but it works better with layout and is a bit more legible. The old one is shown here at left, the new one at right.
That's about it for now. I would love to hear some input on the new numerals and rubrication.
Simulation
A lot of time was spent working on the simulation of AI kingdoms. I'm fairly satisfied with how things work inside the player's kingdom, but there are still a number of things that need to happen for the non-player kingdoms. Using the same rules where possible is of course something I want to do, however, for example, the economic simulation assumes you're going to be getting a few negative treasury events in the course of the year. This has to be controlled for, otherwise the AIs become unreasonably wealthy.
There are lots of things like this that needed, and still need, work. Unfortunately this stuff makes horrible screenshots.
Rubrication
Screenshots are something I've been struggling with. This is ultimately a visual medium, but I've been doing some work that just doesn't work with that. So I consciously took a bit of time last month to improve some things I could show off for this post!
Rubrication was a process in which certain letters or words in manuscripts were emphasized, usually with the addition of red ink. There are a number of historically-attested methods of doing this: red letters, initial-strokes, and even patterns of dots. Thus far Dei Gratia Rex has used red letters because that was simple. However, given that it was more common for this sort of thing, I've switched over to using initial-strokes.
Each stroke is actually slightly customized per letter. Further, there's some randomization going on to make each stroke ever so slightly different in terms of length, width, and curvature — as one would expect from a scribal hand. It is a very subtle effect; without pointing it out I wonder if it would even be noticed. That said, I do feel that a lot of little touches like this, even if not fully grasped at first, contribute to the medieval feel of the overall work. Here is some example text at normal and 4x magnification:
Numerals
Numbers have thus far played a bit of havoc with text layout to the point that I wrote out number words in the main text more often than not. I decided to find a similar font with numerals that played a bit nicer. These new numerals don't, for example, have long descending sevens. This might actually be less authentically medieval, but it works better with layout and is a bit more legible. The old one is shown here at left, the new one at right.
Wrapping Up
That's about it for now. I would love to hear some input on the new numerals and rubrication.