November's Post
A little late perhaps, but the time for the monthly update post is here.
I'm actually at a bit of a loss as to what to write in this one. Lots of things have conspired to steal time from me lately. This happens now and again; other activities sometimes have to take priority over unreleased games. Annoyingly, the work I accomplished doesn't show well. I had considered just postponing, but in retrospect that's not wise for other reasons. Anyway, a quick list of things I've been working on, then a larger discussion of relation-system changes in anticipation of family events:
For most relationships, DGR uses a single number. If you've played certain other character-based strategy games, this may be familiar to you. Zero represents indifference. Lower values indicate disdain while higher values conversely indicate approval. This is a simple system and an unreasonably effective one. There are some things I do differently, but those things are the one set of features I'm playing close to the vest. More on that later, but hopefully not too much later.
Despite how well this works for most things, there are a few places where it doesn't work. I think the classic example is you could start a day with a near-maximum relationship value with your romantic partner, and at the end of the day discover clandestine infidelity. Your relationship would most likely change quite a lot, but it would never pass through indifference.
I believe the prevailing narrative design advice is to forgo the numeric relationship value and use flags instead, but that would get unwieldy with thousands of randomly generated characters when I mostly only care about the overall value. Other games, like that character-based strategy game, throw around a lot of +/- 100 adjustments for certain things, but that can result in your rivals still having positive relations with you. Instead of either of those, I am keeping (for characters for whom it is relevant) a number of different sorts of relationship scores concurrently.
It is possible to like someone but not love them; a friend who doesn't share your love is a common tragedy, after all. More confusingly, but very humanly, it is possible to love someone, but not be in love with them. It is true that in a world of arranged marriages these things don't quite carry the same meaning as they do to us moderns. They do mean something, though. The ideal situation for medieval nobles was that love might be found in marriage eventually, even if it begins with two strangers. This system is now more or less in, but content using it remains to be written.
Writing said content! And trying a bit more to get to the bottom of that data issue. One way or the other, expect a more visual update next time.
I'm actually at a bit of a loss as to what to write in this one. Lots of things have conspired to steal time from me lately. This happens now and again; other activities sometimes have to take priority over unreleased games. Annoyingly, the work I accomplished doesn't show well. I had considered just postponing, but in retrospect that's not wise for other reasons. Anyway, a quick list of things I've been working on, then a larger discussion of relation-system changes in anticipation of family events:
Changes
- Two missing pieces from the Magnum Concilium (I know, I know): first nobles can ask for land, and second relations are actually affected when forging ahead with only partial support. The latter differs from doing things with no support. This was meant to be in earlier, but slipped my mind.
- Bugfix: a number of events have weights that grow over time, for example the negotiations for wedding terms and advisor missions. The math on all of these had to be adjusted significantly, as there's now too much content to multiply the base weight. Seriously, in testing, it took like 25 months in order to get the negotiations to fire, and the woman had already married some other noble, every time. I could queue the event at a fixed time, but I reserve that for things that cannot use the event system, like the death of bishops.
- Bugfix: The player character no longer checks his relationship with himself on the wedding night.
- Autosaves: I think there's a data race. Tragically, like most race conditions, it is devilishly difficult to reproduce. I wrote a lot diagnostics to try to catch this. It's not done yet, but I think I'm closing in. On the other hand, the "circa 2010 hardware" I mention in the system requirements is in the process of dying, so that could be the source of the corruption. Either way, reproducibility is a major goal in DGR: from a given seed, the same sequence of inputs needs to result in the same set of outputs. This is fine on normal saves and usually autosaves, so finding out why it occasionally isn't on the latter needs to be solved.
Types of relationship
For most relationships, DGR uses a single number. If you've played certain other character-based strategy games, this may be familiar to you. Zero represents indifference. Lower values indicate disdain while higher values conversely indicate approval. This is a simple system and an unreasonably effective one. There are some things I do differently, but those things are the one set of features I'm playing close to the vest. More on that later, but hopefully not too much later.
Despite how well this works for most things, there are a few places where it doesn't work. I think the classic example is you could start a day with a near-maximum relationship value with your romantic partner, and at the end of the day discover clandestine infidelity. Your relationship would most likely change quite a lot, but it would never pass through indifference.
I believe the prevailing narrative design advice is to forgo the numeric relationship value and use flags instead, but that would get unwieldy with thousands of randomly generated characters when I mostly only care about the overall value. Other games, like that character-based strategy game, throw around a lot of +/- 100 adjustments for certain things, but that can result in your rivals still having positive relations with you. Instead of either of those, I am keeping (for characters for whom it is relevant) a number of different sorts of relationship scores concurrently.
It is possible to like someone but not love them; a friend who doesn't share your love is a common tragedy, after all. More confusingly, but very humanly, it is possible to love someone, but not be in love with them. It is true that in a world of arranged marriages these things don't quite carry the same meaning as they do to us moderns. They do mean something, though. The ideal situation for medieval nobles was that love might be found in marriage eventually, even if it begins with two strangers. This system is now more or less in, but content using it remains to be written.
What's next
Writing said content! And trying a bit more to get to the bottom of that data issue. One way or the other, expect a more visual update next time.