More news

Originally posted by majicDave:

Hi folks, just thought I'd better check in. I've been pretty productive these last few days, refining the system for managing destinations, and last night I spawned the first static AI tribe at the correct location at the correct time, so that's a good step forward.

Now I'm working on spawning in structures too. This is going to be a little more challenging than I first expected, as all of the logic to determine valid placement for structures is currently client-side only. But it's not too bad, just a few hours work. And it needs to be done for multiplayer anyway.

I'm tidying up a few other areas as I go too. I want all of this stuff to be very easily moddable, as it would be great to see mods that add new areas to go and explore, or new types of AI tribes.

And I'm spending most of my coding time on a MacBook while my ankle heals, so I've also fixed a few Mac specific issues too, like weirdness when scrolling using the trackpad.

The MacBook in general is working out great, as I'm fitting in a significant amount of work scattered through the day and night whenever I get a chance. This approach never worked for me before, (I've always been a desktop guy, and aimed for 3-4 hours sessions uninterrupted) but for whatever reason it's working very well now. So I'm now working at a good pace, and feeling super motivated.

More keeps dropping!

Originally posted by majicDave:

Making good progress today, working on populating tribes with existing history/state when you come across them, instead of them all sitting around in a circle. This code can also be run when you first select your own tribe too, so that will open up the potential for an "advanced start" option.

First up I'm working on hay-related progression. So in the screenshot this is a tribe I just selected, and it has already spawned in a storage area, cleared an area of grass, stored some of that, and put more lying around and being carried by sapiens, with orders to store what they are carrying. This already feels way better, a lot more natural, so it might be that something like this with just a few resources and a bit of activity becomes the default for most new tribes, especially in an "easy" location.

From here it should be pretty straight forward for the loader to give some sapiens skills, unlock discoveries, and start building huts and things too, which can all be used if you find another tribe a few days later, or if you want an advanced start yourself.

Originally posted by majicDave:

Continuing to work on the "destination builder", and it's coming along nicely. I've rewritten what I had to be data driven, as that makes a lot of sense for this kind of thing, and will make it a lot easier to add lots of variety and complexity to generated villages. So the code for this is now nice and tidy and well tested already.

I've added the ability to unlock discoveries now too, so now if it manages to place a storage area, clear some hay, it can then go on to unlock thatch building, assign the skill to one of the sapiens, and place some thatch huts.

From here I'm going to work for a little longer on this stuff, add campfires, beds, maybe some hunting/butchering related unlocks, but nothing too advanced at this stage. Then I'm going to start on the actual interactions, and I'll be starting on a totally new UI for managing your relationship with other tribes.

I should say now too, that once I start on this, I'll actually be working on a bunch of stuff that needs to be done for multiplayer too. My plan is to ship 0.5 with experimental multiplayer support along with all the trading mechanics. And then fully release multiplayer along with conflict in 0.6.

Originally posted by majicDave:

More good progress these past few days. I've continued to work on the destination builder for AI tribes, and it now spawns craft areas, crafted tools, campfires, beds, and small plantations. It also assigns one of the types of medicines to each tribe, so early on you can find all 3 plants at a village for a given type of medicine, and it spawns a few random, maybe exotic trees at each AI tribe location too.

I've sorted out all the remaining issues for building placement, so it ensures there are no collisions server-side, and it can flatten areas of terrain now too.

And I've made some progress planning the UI for trading, and have some exciting ideas to start working on tomorrow.

Beats me why someone is only active in Discord and absent from Steam (and/or GoG) forum. New players look for the game in Steam, GoG, Epic, not in Discord. And most even already players don't look for updates from Discord.
I have nothing against DIscord, I have it open myself now and pretty much always. But it is NOT the main forum to keep contact with the players. And silence from devs is bad, very bad.

I don't own this game yet. Just following its development.

And you did good posting Discord stuff. Developer should "waste" some of his time doing that too. Even if his Discord buddies would see less of him then.

More news!

Originally posted by majicDave:

I've started working on the new tribe interactions today, and it's going well. I've created a new "greet" plan to replace the recruit plan, and the next step is to bring up some UI and work on the options and flow for these interactions, as well as starting on the tribe relationship score system.

At one point I saw one of my sapiens taking a branch 500m to another tribe's campfire, which I've now sorted out. These are the kind of things I'll need to keep an eye out for over the next little while, very much expected at this point. And soon enough we will be able to ally with other tribes, and voluntarily stock up their campfires, but for now I'm just keeping that in mind as I go.

This morning I also spent an entire 4 hours tracking down the well reported issue where the terrain wasn't loading as you scrolled around with the arrow keys when in map mode or choosing a tribe. The fix (commenting out a single line of code) actually made a huge improvement to terrain load speed in general, and it's looking great now. Just a shame it was so hard to track down.

Nice to be get back and sort out all of these longstanding issues, and the new interaction stuff is off to a good start too.

Also

Originally posted by retrobarbaari:

Beats me why someone is only active in Discord and absent from Steam (and/or GoG) forum. New players look for the game in Steam, GoG, Epic, not in Discord. And most even already players don't look for updates from Discord.
I have nothing against DIscord, I have it open myself now and pretty much always. But it is NOT the main forum to keep contact with the players. And silence from devs is bad, very bad.

I don't own this game yet. Just following its development.

And you did good posting Discord stuff. Developer should "waste" some of his time doing that too. Even if his Discord buddies would see less of him then.

Thank you. I am trying my best to relay the latest news here asap as they drop. If i can help dave in anyway, i will do it and this thread is what i came up with so he can just consentrate on what he does best, the dev work =) Believe me, i am eager just like everyone else for new updates. But we just gotta be patient and let him do his magic.

Thank you for this thread! Sapiens has been on my radar for a while, but I've been passing on purchasing it because on the main page it looks like updates stopped earlier this year.

Originally posted by keltobin:

Thank you for this thread! Sapiens has been on my radar for a while, but I've been passing on purchasing it because on the main page it looks like updates stopped earlier this year.

Just keep hanging on. Dont give up hope on this game. I just about gave up on this game, until someone started this thread. Now I can understand why updates are very slow :)

I think the dev of this game needs to make Kipster a moderator on this Sapiens forum :)

More dropping! Also, thank you for your kind words guys!

Originally posted by majicDave:

More good progress today. Now that I'm spawning a bunch of test tribes around me, I'm seeing more loose ends and issues to sort out. The system for hibernating tribes was ready to go, but not actually hibernating anything yet, so I got that working and tested it a bunch today, fixing a few bugs.

For most objects in the game, they are automatically loaded and unloaded around the player and sapiens as everyone moves around. But the key thing for AI tribes is that they have sapiens in them, so without any extra work, their sapiens would stay loaded, and so would everything around them, eventually overloading the server with dozens of tribes living out their lives off camera. With the new hibernation system, when you get far enough away, all the sapiens get saved out to the database, with all the unimportant stuff stripped out, and the sapiens are then removed from the world so it can all be unloaded and stop taking up resources. Then if you come back later, they all get loaded up again. I still need to make them age, replace them if they would die, get them doing random things, and make the hibernated tribes advance, but that's for another day!

Also today I've been working on some basic markers to make sapiens from other tribes (including nomad tribes) much easier to spot. Distant tribes also have their own markers, which I've added a tribe name to, and they'll become a shortcut later for managing your relationships too. These markers all use another new system I've been working on, which will allow me to easily add custom markers soon too (a highly requested feature), and give controls for turning their visibility on and off.

Kipster thanks for this. And also, if you wouldn't mind, filling me in on our dev's injury? I did notice updates had gone quiet, but I didn't really look into it until just now. Good to see he's still working on it.

New week, more news.

Originally posted by majicDave:

These past couple of days I've been working on that first interaction between tribes. Initially it was all planning and design work, establishing how the relationship system would work, designing data structures to store everything, network communication etc.

Then yesterday I started on this new tribe view. The game needed some visual representation of a tribe when you first meet them, so I thought why not just render the whole tribe! There is still more tweaking to do, and I could quite happily spend another couple of days giving them more new poses, making them look at each other and the camera, grouping by relationships etc etc, but that will mostly have to wait until other higher priority tasks are done. A good start for now though.

This work gives me two new features in the engine too, one being the ability to specify animation poses in UI objects, which means I could have facial expressions in icons and things too (you guessed it, I do plan to make them all look mad when the tribe is mad at you). And the other is that I can now easily render multiple objects in the UI together. Was a bit of a job getting all that stuff working.

From here I'll be continuing to work on the trading and tribe relationship mechanics. The planning is nearly all done, so now it's a matter of turning it into code.

Originally posted by MagicMage:

Kipster thanks for this. And also, if you wouldn't mind, filling me in on our dev's injury? I did notice updates had gone quiet, but I didn't really look into it until just now. Good to see he's still working on it.

You're welcome! He hasn't said much more about his injury or i just have missed it but seems like that he can now sit for prolonged periods of time on his computer and get work done. So i am assuming the injury is getting better.

He should release a small update on some fixes or new features, so that people would not think the game is abandoned.

Thanks, keep them Discord updates coming!

Originally posted by retrobarbaari:

He should release a small update on some fixes or new features, so that people would not think the game is abandoned.

Thanks, keep them Discord updates coming!

Yep I was thinking the same. Even if it is just a very small update in the game. At least its a sign that the dev is still working on the game. Words are cheap. On discord or wherever the dev is hiding and working from, he can say anything, The proof is in the game.

Originally posted by retrobarbaari:

He should release a small update on some fixes or new features, so that people would not think the game is abandoned.

Thanks, keep them Discord updates coming!

Making game isn't that easy. He cannot do that without breaking the whole game. But yes, i will keep these updates coming!

Originally posted by Buckshot:

Originally posted by retrobarbaari:

He should release a small update on some fixes or new features, so that people would not think the game is abandoned.

Thanks, keep them Discord updates coming!

Yep I was thinking the same. Even if it is just a very small update in the game. At least its a sign that the dev is still working on the game. Words are cheap. On discord or wherever the dev is hiding and working from, he can say anything, The proof is in the game.

He has delivered every bit he has ever said in discord. It might take a while to get a good batch of stuff. But as you can see he is working on tribe interactions. If he would release an update right now and get a bunch of broken tribes, who are you going to shout at? Yes, to the dev.... So be patient =) <3