Ultima Ratio Regum 0.11 Update #21: Bugs and Polishing

Hello friends!

So this week – in a similar vein to alternating for the last few updates between big new features and additions, and polishing and tweaking and completing existing features – we are swinging back away from last week’s massive bunch of new items, to a major process of fixing and improving existing things. The number of bugs at present had reached the level where over 100 were being tracked on my list – and that’s only the ones I can find, of course, and I’m merely one playtester in a deliriously complex game world! – and I was really feeling the need to bring these down. This was not just for my own psychological wellbeing and feeling of progress being made, but also in anticipation of releasing the 0.10.3 release in the semi-reasonable future, and wanting to ensure that any playtesters there can focus on hunting down bugs I don’t know about, rather than continually tripping up over (and sometimes having their game crash because of) bugs I do know about.

So, this last three weeks has thus been a grand bug purge, and it pleases me immensely to say that this list has been hugely reduced. When I last posted an update I said that 192 bugs had been fixed so far during the 0.11 development process, and that number has now – very pleasingly – climbed all the way to 288! Some of these are minor, some are major; some are banal, some are really quite amusing; but I’ve got them all done here, and included a bunch of relevant pics as well, so without further ado, here is 0.11 update #21 – a great bug hunt (with probably another to come in the future, too).

Enjoy!

Bug, tweaks, and changes:

• Fixed an issue with characters who have both freckles and a beard, which led to the character often looking like their beard was filled to the brim with cheetos.
• Added another generator for mountain names into the pool of existing mountain name generators, yielding names like “Titan’s Lance” or “Giant’s Fist” or “Troll’s Hall” or “Behemoth’s Axe” and so on.
• Fixed an issue with some statue bottoms, especially the more unusual ones, very rarely not having the correct background colours when displayed against a black background.
• Trying to donate to a religion when you have no valid donation items anywhere in your inventory no longer leads to a bit of a weird formatting glitch on the left-hand side of the screen (where the item currently selected would normally appear).
• Resolved a couple of wording mistakes for some religions when you’re talking to the priest about a bunch of topics.
• Some religious relic types for pantheon-style gods can no longer sometimes accidentally draw on a colour or a word to do with a different pantheon type, rather than their own.
• Items that should burn up in fires no longer seem to smash first before burning up in the fire when you throw them or drop them in.
• Chests no longer spawn on top of statues (whoops).
• Water and ice now have slightly more distinct out-of-vision dark colours for evenings and nights, rather than having colours which are very similar and can sometimes make the two quite hard to distinguish.
• You can now only press spacebar to view a hand when you’re on the correct window, rather than being able to do it at any time and having a phantom hand just pop out of nowhere (whoops).
• Fixed a few typos for consistency in various in-game windows.
• Shields now generally have the word “shield” after them (except “pavise”, which is a term in itself), so it no longer says you pick up a “kite” but instead a “kite shield” (and so on for the other types).

• Fixed various typos in religious relic generation and a couple of other name generators.
• Minor aspects of some religious staves no longer regenerate themselves randomly each time you look at the staff in question.
• Removed a totally unnecessary “draw item again” call (which delayed things by 0.1 to 0.2 seconds) when you “use” an item, except when the actual image of the item would be changed by the use, e.g. using one of a finite set of arrows, or other things of this sort.
• Minor aspects of mambeles (one of the throwing weapon types) also no longer regenerate themselves randomly each time you look at the item in question.
• Fixed a bug where the game didn’t always know what character or colour of floor should be underneath an object you’re destroying, and would sometimes either make a mistake, or simply just crash.
• Slums and graveyards can no longer be trapped outside cities in areas that are hard to reach, and instead there will always be doors that lead to them from all connecting districts of the city.
• The wording used when you’re on the world map and looking at a castle “district” (i.e. the castle part of a capital city) is now a little clearer.
• Removed a few other places for sphinx-houses to spawn that I really didn’t want them spawning in.
• Trying to show a character’s hand no longer very rarely sends to that function a string instead of the actual information required to generate the hand, hence yielding a crash.
• The bottoms of books (i.e. showing the bottom edges of all the pages in the book) are no longer identical for multiple books at a different quality, but are instead now generated along with everything else (somehow I overlooked this one when designing that image generator).
• Entering and leaving various crosshair options, such as selecting a thing to look at, or a person to talk to, or a location to place a bookmark, no longer sometimes causes messages to become duplicated in the message log.
• Pressing escape to leave the religion view screen now correctly renders the rest of the world behind the screen.

• Universities must now spawn at least one map tile in from a coastline – this is because these are going to be complex and very full map tiles once I get around to generating them (and they’ll be where the player starts, too!) and so I decided we can’t have part of the area being chopped off by water in a coastline.
• Fixed a text formatting issue when you’re trying to pick up some or all of a large number of items off the ground.
• Fixed a related issue with this menu sometimes showing 27 instead of 26 possible items, and thus choosing the ‘{‘ character after a-z characters to let you choose what to pick up.
• Relatedly, sphinx-houses can no longer spawn on rivers, again to prevent weirdness and to allow the area to really focus on the building.
• Fixed some longer names and things like this extending too far across a character’s look-up window.
• Significantly improved the visuals on holy books for pantheon-type religions – previously some of the colour combinations had clashed quite badly and looked a bit weird, but all of these have now been resolved.
• The word “shop” is no longer clunkily and unnecessarily added to most shops when you look at areas on the world map, so it now just says “Shieldsmith” (or whatever) instead of “Shieldsmith Shop”.
• Canteens now update their weight depending on the amount of substance inside the canteen.
• The same is now also true for bottles of alcohol!
• Plants now again spawn in desert areas with settlements, rather than only in wild desert areas.
• The generated visuals for metal ingots now properly vary, moving the ingot visuals from only around thirty permutations (what was I thinking?) to around ten thousand (different heights, different depths, different widths, and minor chips / damage / imperfections). Much better.
• Fixed a few generation issues with the visuals of the marble religious relic archetype.
• Pressing escape at the end of world generation has the same function as using the “cancel” option when deciding whether you should save a world over an existing world, or not.
• Changed the characters for bows, crossbows, rings and necklaces, to help them stand out more.
• Interacting with crowns no longer sometimes crashes the game (whoops).

• Cycling between looking at a face and looking at that person’s hands no longer, in rare circumstances, generates some strange graphical issues (white tiles just appearing out of nowhere).
• Cacti no longer sometimes spawn on roads when you enter a map grid which has a road going through desert terrain, and can only spawn on sand as they are supposed to.
• Mansions can no longer spawn with single beds instead of double beds.
• Cycling through long lists of items to pick up no longer sometimes fails to correctly print the updated list pages.
• Embassies now have a wide range of ambient messages involving diplomats and clerks chatting to each other about their home nation, and their conversations will always sensibly reflect the culture of that home nation.
• The “chiefdom” leadership type has been removed, in anticipation of vastly more detail being added to the hunter-gatherer civs (and their renaming to “ancient” civs) – for now, they’re all monarchies.
• Long items for things you are looking at in the surrounding area are no longer potentially so long that they don’t fit on the right-hand side of the screen, and instead get a “…” added to part of their name so that they do fit.
• Indoor water, much like outdoor water, now ripples and gradually changes colours, characters, etc.
• Fixed a problem with “parables”-type philosophy books and “ethics”-type philosophy books sometimes getting confused and turning into a weird combination philosophy book, and (very rarely) crashing the game because the game can’t figure out what book cover to generate.
• Plurals and singulars are now correctly selected for the “it is wet to the touch” message if you are picking up an item out of a fountain, and “it is hot to the touch” if you’re taking something which doesn’t burn out of a fire (so now “they are” will be correctly added when appropriate).
• Jars of whale oil now have different patterns for the specks / dots in the liquid, making the variation between the items much more significant (this was an item type that tended to look a bit same-y, so this has made multiple copies of the item a little more dissimilar).
• When looking at NPCs you can now only see their first two lookup windows, i.e. appearance and health – you cannot see their status in religions, or in nations. That instead has to be divined by what they wear, how they look, what they say, what they do, etc…

• Added a whole bunch of new variations to the name generators for city districts and reprioritized the weighting of the generators towards more interesting and less generic names.
• Fixed a few typos and issues involving policies and how they display on screen.
• Resolved a graphical error with the “goblet” religious relic archetype that sometimes caused the base / stand of the goblet to generate incorrectly.
• Fixed a visual error where the name of an area might sometimes be too long for the minimap window and would overflow unpleasantly.
• Drinking from a canteen while looking at the substance inside the canteen (a lot more on this is coming soon) no longer switches back to the canteen image instead of staying on the substance image – unless that is the last dose, in which case, it does switch back to the canteen image, as the canteen is then empty.
• Fixed a bug with the game just randomly deciding that a certain map grid the player was moving onto for the first time should be desert, with sometimes pretty catastrophic generative consequences.
• Fixed a small number of settlements on the world map appearing white when you were viewing the heights of areas, rather than appearing as the height colour.
• Resolved a problem where items could land on certain terrain features and not really understand how they were then supposed to behave.
• Cultist shrines and religious altars now use the same character as statues (a character which will also, before too long, be used for other things as well), in order to reduce confusion and make they don’t look like heavy weapons lying on the ground.
• Removed the dark grey colour option from tribal civs because it was interacting poorly, as a colour choice, with the image generators for a number of different items.
• Resolved an issue with how some of the “plate” relic type were generating, specifically with the platinum ones not looking quite right and seeming to lack the quality / shine / lustre of the others.
• Brazen heads no longer spawn in nations with the “mechanical” intellectual culture. They are going to be… much, much more important than that. That intellectual culture option will instead generate shops where one can buy basic (if highly expensive) prosthetic hands / arms / feet / legs, to replace any that might be lost in battle.

• The “plate” relic type now correctly always shows the right religious symbol for the religion it belongs to, rather than something that can sometimes get a little bit glitchy under some circumstances.
• Fixed a graphical bug in the crossbow generator which sometimes made part of the wooden structure of the crossbow stop before reaching the… er, the equivalent of the “string” on a bow. The wooden thing. The thing the bolt lies on. I don’t know what it’s called. Please don’t unfollow me.
• Removed a few lingering pieces of a religion agenda item which isn’t currently implemented, but could sometimes be selected and cause the game to crash when trying to work out what items the priests should be asking for.
• Fires and candle stands now flicker by changing colour (yellow, orange, red) between turns, just like water (and lava) change their appearance over time.
• Improved the description of button items, to make clearer what they are and how one acquired them.
• The use of “a” and “an” in the “you have found a new thing” text generator now fully correctly takes account of the first letters of things you see, e.g. “an axesmith’s shop”.
• The destroy text, i.e. the message generated when you destroy an item, is now properly correct for a bag of gunpowder.
• NPCs no longer, under very rare circumstances, print underneath items lying on the world map – I do like the mental image of this, however, with a character crawling into the soil to try to keep a book lying on the ground above them.
• Unique items, like crowns and gemstones and relics, are always called by their name (“The Crown of the Six Swords” instead of “Crown”, or whatever), and this reflects also when they are dropped, with the message “You drop the [name]” instead of “You drop a [whatever]”.
• Mining shops and brewers do now spawn consistently again, as they should, and can thus once more meet all of your digging and drinking (drigging?) needs.
• Fixed a graphical issue where items on the ground but underneath overhanging things – like tree branches / leaves, or a gate, or a [deleted due to future spoiler], or some [also deleted for the same reason], were only visible when you weren’t looking at them (??). Now they show up correctly regardless of where the player is looking, and you can no longer lose an item under a tree.
• Fixed a related issue where weather effects made items on the ground sometimes look strange, and made the player’s “@” appear on top of trees and other overhanging things, rather than underneath them.

• Fixed a freeze bug with farms sometimes being unable to find a plant or tree or livestock area to place in one region of the farm when generating, and consequently getting stuck in a loop.
• Dyes now spawn in textile shops, and all have unique patterns and designs, rather than regenerating small bits of the design each time you look at them (long term readers will know this is a common bug with new item types / generators).
• The game no longer has an extremely rare crash when trying to show the player character on the local map under certain and highly-specific weather conditions.
• Reworded the lookup information for books to take account of the fact we’ll need more information there soon (opened / unopened), and so the use of words in the space we have there has to be a lot more efficient.
• The visual patterns on high-quality and medium-quality shields are now slightly more randomized and offset to a random x and y degree, moving the chance of two shields having the same pattern and in the same location from 100% to more like 5% or so, and adding a fair bit more variety to that generator.
• Fixed a minor graphical glitch in the axe image generator.
• You can now refill a canteen with water by spending next to a river, a pool, a reflecting pool inside a religious building, or some other source of water; you can also refill them by standing next to a fountain, and then you are given the option to fill the canteen with whatever’s in that fountain. Which, I’m sure, will always be water.
• Corrected a few ambient messages which incorrectly assigned directions to more general things, e.g. “there is a stillness here to the south-east” instead of the much more logical “there is a stillness here all around you”, for a graveyard.
• URR no longer automatically starts in winter, and now starts in a randomly selected season / month / day, with the starting year being between 1702 and 1729 (although this affects nothing specifically – there’s no more / less technology for later / sooner years, or anything like that).
• Much like ingots, pocket watches have seen their generators totally transformed, moving the number of possible pocket watches from around two hundred permutations, up to around ten thousand permutations. This is still not the most variable generator, but with this being such a rare item, I think ten thousand permutations is perfectly sufficient, and much more interesting.

• Re-centered the writing placement within a couple of menus and windows whose text was a little wonky.
• Fixed a very, very rare crash bug where the game would be looking around for somewhere around a city to spawn a graveyard and a slum, and under rare conditions it would look beyond the edge of the map, and explode.
• Fixed a visual problem where the colours on the corners of some religious vestments could go a bit berserk.
• Fixed a crash bug where looking at a single-item “stack” of rifle/pistol balls, or arrows or bolts, couldn’t always calculate how to best describe the number of items in that stack (i.e. 1).
• Player now begins with the game with quite a few items, specifically to maximize the ability of a new player to interact with the game world.
• Deleted a bit of left-over stuff to do with the now-outdated storage system.
• Drinking a full canteen no longer leads to a crash under rare circumstances.
• Your volume of water in canteens, and your amount of survival supplies, correctly visually update themselves on the sidebar when you make a purchase at a city gate.
• Fixed an issue with unnecessary extra black spaces appearing after an NPC’s name in the “look” window / menu, and thus causing it to look a bit strange and not be properly flush against the right-hand side of the screen.
• Masks which need to shatter upon impact do now, indeed, shatter when they should.
• If there is very high sun, and very high rainfall, the game’s weather descriptions now note that a rainbow exists, and a little colour effect to denote it is added to the weather part of the sidebar for as long as the rainbow lasts!

What next?

So, there we are! Almost a full hundred bugs resolved or minor fixes deployed, or minor additions added (what else would an addition be?), and my list of these small issues to resolve has been significantly shortened – although I confess it still remains intimidatingly large, even if it is far less so than was the case three months ago. This is not the only mega bug purge required at the moment in anticipation of 0.10.3, but this will do for now to give me that sense of closing things off, completing things, and not just constantly being on a rush of newness and leaving behind an increasingly alarming trail of stuff that needs fixing. Next week, therefore, we’ll be back to new features! My priority is to get a few final new features implemented before I then sit down and work on generating universities, which are from 0.10.3 onwards going to be where the player starts the game, and should be a really fun and exciting thing to generate (and not just because I work at one). After that, we’ll then be onto the really big stuff, which is taking some of the initial riddle / clue generators and stitching them together into a single, proof of concept, fully-followable, generated riddle thread, for the 0.11 release… but one step at a time.

As ever, thank you all so much for reading 🙂 – please do leave any thoughts, comments, questions or observations you might have, and if you know someone who really enjoys reading long roguelike bug-lists, but they might not have heard of URR before now – well, you know what to do. Thanks so much everyone, and I’ll see you all again in three weeks from now!