Odd Realm News

Hey friends!

Quick post to let you know I've put out a hotfix to the game. I noticed some load issues and wanted to put out a small update to address these. Here are the notes for it:

• Enabled additional error printing in the Player.log file.
  
• Fixed a bug where loading the game could sometimes get stuck in winter.
  
• Fixed a bug where the resolutions list wasn't showing options lower than 800 width. 768 should now be the lowest option to support the game's lowest resolution of 1200x768.
  
• Fixed a bug where players weren't able to mine upwards.
  
• Fixed a bug where certain blocks weren't being deconstructed by the clear/remove job and would then cause the block to not be assigned any clear/remove job again.
  
• Added additional text for the initial game boot to indicate loading. Some expressed that they thought the game was stuck here because it shows just a black screen.
  

Thanks and have a nice remainder of your week!

Waylon

Hey folks!

Hope you are all doing spectacularly!

I'm still trucking along on this update and I'm starting to get close to a beta build candidate.

This month I finished up the core system improvements I mentioned in the last post. That was a real slog but hugely improved performance and I'm happy with the state it's in.

I had to take last week to fix up the tooltips in the game because they were driving me nuts. They had lots of weird positioning bugs and the under-the-hood way they updated was super confusing. I also wanted to do a pass on the entity tooltip as I have always felt it was poorly done. This is the expanded version (holding ctrl) of the entity tooltip:



And collapsed (hovering over a target entity):


As you can see, it's much more organized but there are a few additional elements. Namely, the player can see an entity's equipment now. I've also moved all the command options over to here (you see them when an entity is selected).

Tooltips now support multiple targets, meaning you can have an entity selected but also see the block your cursor is over. Whereas, before, you'd only see the entity.

I spent some time unifying the overlays for jobs, zones, etc. Plus, the overlay is way clearer regarding whether blocks are in the air, an obstruction, covered, etc.



You'll also notice I've re-organized the hud. The toolbar has been moved over to the right and merged with the overlay window button panel. I've gotten rid of the utilities toolbar menu, and all utilities can now be accessed from that bottom right bar. This takes one click step out of accessing them. Plus they now have their own hotkeys.



All the toolbar menus (i.e., jobs, blueprints, plants, zones, rooms) have access to the search panel. So you can now use SHIFT+'Char' to narrow down the buttons there. Players can also now click the search panel to enter search text rather than holding shift.

I've updated the hotkey settings to allow for modifier keys to be used (as well as fixed a ton of hotkey related bugs). So, now players can change opening the job menu to SHIFT+J or whatever hotkeys they choose. I still have to make mouse hotkeys editable! One day, I swear! xD

With the vast majority of system and UI fixes/changes/additions out of the way, I can finally finish up adding the new content I was working on. i.e., new capture props (cages and such), weapons, gear, etc.

OH, I also found a new place to live and am moving at the end of the month. With that also out of the way I can get back to my regular work schedule. This last month has been really tough to get a lot of work done due to that and current world events. So, thanks for all the kind words and patience.

Take care and stay safe,

Waylon

Hey Odd Realm crew!

This will be a VERY short dev log as I don't have a ton of new things to show off but I wanted to touch base so you know I'm still working away.

Let me take a sec to thank you all for your patience and trust in me. I know this update is taking a long time to put out there. I'm working on things which are complicated and difficult to wrap up and it feels like cutting one's lawn with scissors. However, I am getting closer each day. Also, I'm in the middle of looking for somewhere else to live and that takes up a lot of my attention. But thanks so much for supporting me and the game and being a wonderful community.

As for what I'm working on, I'm still closing out the tasks which I mentioned in the last dev log but I also overhauled a lot of the job systems and world rendering engine. I did this because of some serious behaviour bugs that would appear but also because there was a pretty serious lag when changing layers, panning around the map, and changing the zoom. This lag is gone and the game will now efficiently render the entire world without having to do magic tricks such as hiding offloaded terrain with distance fog. This means players can completely remove the distance fog effect if they wish. I know some people don't like it, so there you go. Otherwise, you can change the distance to your personal taste.

There's lots of other tech changes and improvements I've made which will benefit the game in the long run and I want to stress how important this update will be for reducing implementation time for future updates. Specifically the next Ardyn update. :)

Alright, back to work for me. Thanks again and I hope you are all happy and healthy.

Waylon

Hi friends!

This post will not be that interesting as I'm in the middle of a huuuuuuuge systems overhaul/upgrade and will mostly be about that. Before I get into it, I do want to say thanks for all your patience. Unfortunately, this update has been one which has had a million cascading tasks and is taking me a very long time to complete. I do appreciate all the support, feedback, and kind words. Keeps me going! Ok, enough sap from me. xD

Overhaul and improvements! Essentially, I'm extracting a very old system for entities called, 'behaviours'. It's a system which tries to dictate entity actions whilst also being a sort of status effect tracker and it's incredibly ugly. It causes a ton of weird--heh--behaviours in the game which often conflict with the entity state machine and so on. I won't get into too much of the tech details here because it just won't make sense without me walking through the code. However, the solution I'm putting in place is much cleaner and is only a slight detour from work on the update.

One lovely addition/change that's related to this is that many behaviours now appear as jobs on the map. Whereas, before, they were actions taking place without any feedback whatsoever. A great example is item movement. Now, you'll actually see jobs on items that indicate that they are going to be moved and which settler is doing so. These are 'auto jobs' much like the ones created by the farm room. Not only does this clearly communicate the actions of entities, but also gives players the ability to prioritize jobs--and keep them from being done at all if that is the desire (setting the priority to 0). The job may say something like, 'incorrect zone,' meaning the item is going to be removed from the zone it's in and moved to the correct one. I've added this level of communication to a lot of other entity actions so the player knows exactly what is taking place. i.e., sleeping, mating (wink wink), eating, drinking, putting out fires, etc.

Aside from that rabbit hole of work, I continued to improve the room management flow (this is taken directly from the discord #upcoming channel):

Room TLDR; It's super easy to select/add-to/remove rooms now and they can span multiple z levels OR be placed by another room of the same type.


(The above gif is me placing two new rooms [left-click]+[shift], then selecting the first [right-click]+[shift], adding tiles to it [left-click], selecting the second room [right-click]+[shift], adding tiles to it [left-click].)

Changed the editing of rooms so the same type can be side-by-side and one room can now span multiple z levels. Editing/placing rooms has been streamlined as well. You can easily select a room without using the room list with [shift] + [right-click]. Creating a brand new room, separate from the select room can be done with [shift] + [left-click] or by selecting a new room from the toolbar.
Additionally, players will no longer lose their room names just be adding/removing points.
There's a lot of transferable functionality here that I'm going to use in the future for zones. I want to update the zone system to work more like rooms. So that players can easily designate items, copy old zone groups, and edit at a larger scale. But I'll save that for the update after this one.


(Some quick selecting of rooms with [right-click]+[shift].)

Anyway, hopefully that gives you a good idea of what I'm up to.

Hope you are all well!

Thanks!

Waylon

Hello!

This is NOT a post to say the next update is out! Some confusion there on my last development post as I erroneously used the word, 'update'. haha That's my bad! Also, I noticed some concern that I'm not posting these dev posts enough and all I can say is that it takes quite a bit of time for me to write them and I'd rather focus on work on the game. So, apologies for not writing them every week. I encourage you to join our discord server if you want constant news updates as I'm in there every day talking to the community. Here's a link to that: Discord Server

Anywho, on to the meat and bones:

I'm currently in the process of wrapping up work I had started on re-doing the rooms screen. Now, I know what you're thinking as I've thought it too, 'ugh, more work on a screen that's already done??' The thing is, that screen was initially done pretty poorly and because new rooms (such as the Prison Cell) need way more UI support, I had no choice but to fix it up.

Firstly, the room screen no longer appears when you open the room menu. Instead, you'll see a much smaller panel in the bottom right corner which simply displays a list of all the rooms that have been placed, their current status, and will have the ability to go to them or delete them altogether.





Some things to note about the status of a room:
-Orange rooms indicate that the player has manually added occupants. Green means the room will automatically add/remove occupants based on the room's requirements.
-The little rectangular bar to the right of the name indicates how full/empty the room is as well as whether it is missing required props (indicated by being red).

The main room management window now has its own button on the bottom right toolbar. This window lets players edit individual rooms to a much finer detail.





All rooms start with ideal default settings based on their functionality as they did before. i.e., The animal enclosure requiring Shepherds. Now, players can edit profession, skill, and race individually to have full control over who is automatically occupying the room. So, you could, say, have warriors fulfilling the role of an animal enclosure occupant. In most cases, I don't think players will really need to edit the default setting but the control is there if they wish. There are no restrictions to how players set these requirements. You want a bedroom full of cats? Go for it. The only negative to incorrectly placing occupants like so would be that the room may not be utilized correctly. i.e., manually assigning cats to the workshop and having nothing produced from that room as a result. Rooms such as this have a warning to indicate this misuse.
You can also edit the room size if you wish (with a max level based on the room's placement size in the world). Might be handy if you only want one prisoner per prison cell room. Or you only want one guard.



In the above image you can see the popup which appears when you click to edit room requirements. The symbols on the title bar indicate, 'SELECT ALL, SELECT NONE, RESET TO DEFAULT.'

Something which you cannot see here, because I have yet to add it, is the room ability info. This will be right below the requirements info of the window and will provide room specific control and important benefits the room provides. i.e., Bedrooms will show benefits of beds and family stuff, whereas the prison cell will let you manage food and prisoner permissions.

One other minor addition I've added is the ability to move windows around by middle-mouse dragging them. Windows which can be dragged have a highlighted border when you mouse over them. You can easily reset window positions back to their default and they cannot be dragged completely off screen.



Lastly, I've also added the Scholar profession which lets entities go to the Library room to earn research points to spend on the research tree. I've also added an Alchemist profession and respective room but I don't think that one will make it into version 0.10.0.0 because it will require a lot of room mechanics which would push this update out even further. But I'm looking forward to adding that one to have fun potions in the game and also a method for healing entities. Which means diseases and interesting injuries later! :D

As you can see, I've got a lot on my plate. The room functionality is particularly complicated and I really want to take my time to make sure it is providing players a fun and engaging method for interacting with rooms. Things such as the new diet window and room window update are all carefully planned to lead into the Ardyn race implementation as they will depend heavily on prisoners.

I've learned my lesson about promising dates so I can't really tell you when this version will be out. It won't be soon and I really, really appreciate your patience and support. Just know that I am always working on the game and have no plans to abandon it! :)

Thanks!

W