Ultima Ratio Regum 0.11 Update #27: More Bug Fixing and 0.10.3 Release

Hello everyone, welcome back! As we move towards the holiday period it’s going to be a short-ish post today – but a productive one. Firstly, here’s a list of all the bugs and whatnot fixed in the last few weeks…

Bugs resolved / polishes introduced:

• Civilization names should now correctly use, or not use, “the” in front of them (e.g. “The Realm of the Blue Chimera”, vs “Xujjan’s Holdings”).
• Fixed something like a 1/1000 crash bug in world gen where the game was sometimes unsure where to place a desert.
• Fixed a crash bug where looking at a nomadic shield made the game extremely upset (this is only a temporary fix, defaulting to a generic-ish shield pattern, but with a vastly more detailed one coming later when I get around to it. But the crash is fixed, and that’s the important thing).
• Fixed a crash bug where trying to move diagonally off the world map, while on the local map scale, at an extreme end of the map (i.e. x or y coords of 0 or 249) would collapse the game, due to some deranged code that was 12+ years old.
• Made sure that entering some of the more obscure building sizes and shapes in an upper-class housing district do not sometimes lead to a freeze state.
• Pretty sure I’ve fixed a bug I didn’t understand, in which extraordinarily rare circumstances look lead a message to crash the game because the game couldn’t find the correct punctuation in it. No idea what caused it, but it’s sorted now.
• Made progress towards stopping a save file created during a crash from being dreadfully bugged, and making everything explode when you then reload it. This is really hard though, and very much stretching my Python competence, so… I’m doing my best with this one. Of course, one day, we’ll just have no crashes. Easy.
• Fixed a graphical bug with how the corners of chests would sometimes appear.
• Fixed a crash bug with diamond masks currently not appearing at all – “diamond” masks now share the overall “octagon” shape (because the diamond option proved so intensely difficult to generate without it just looking weird and goofy).
• Items like hearts and thumbs and tokens of gratitude no longer have incomplete messages (e.g. “This was taken from…”, where the “…” should depict a name), and now simply describe their nature, but will get that additional information by 0.11.
• Pressing ‘m’ now just brings up the messages window that shows you all the recent messages in the game, rather than doing quite a number of additional strange things.
• You can no longer crash the game by trying to categorize an item which doesn’t exist.
• Existing the item categorizing screen no longer leaves a little sliver of that UI still up on the screen, instead of correctly clearing it all away.
• The inventory windows no longer flash when you’ve dropped an item.
• Choosing the throw option for an item you’re wearing or wielding, and then deciding against throwing it after all, no longer unequips that item.
• Dropping an item you are wearing once again removes it from your inventory and “unwears” it correctly.
• Choosing the throw option, and then throwing or not throwing, both now correctly reprint an updated (or not) inventory (potentially including the item you were debating throwing) after the action is taken (or not).
• Destroying or throwing or otherwise removing the final item from an inventory category now correctly returns you to the inventory main screen, instead of leaving you in a weird-looking empty inventory that could sometimes produce bugs.
• Fixed a visual error where the tooltip for throwing items would just about survive, in part, after you exited the throwing option.
• A range of the rare item interactions that destroy the item without pressing the “destroy” option, or dropping or throwing it from your inventory – for example, the “use” function for a heart is eating the heart – now correctly update the screen as they should.
• The generated graphics for hearts no longer have a minor error in one corner in 1/10 hearts.
• Notes now correctly remove themselves from your inventory when they are thrown or dropped.
• Fixed a major issue with how octagonal masks were generating, due I think to overlapping variables between octagonal masks and other masks; this is now resolved.
• Punishment masks in nations that are really into torture no longer rarely result in a crash when the game can’t figure out where to put the blood.
• Fixed a crash bug where very rarely inside doors were not generated with he same door ID as the outside version of that door, and thus the game couldn’t work out what to do when the player passed through them.
• Fixed a rare – but not that rare -many-years-old freeze bug in upper-class housing districts. This had an amusing cause, in which servants were climbing to the top floor of a mansion, and then going to sleep at the foot of their master’s or mistress’s bed (i.e. not in the bed, but on the tile next to it). Er… whoops.
• Looking at the “order books” door in a library no longer results in a crash.

…and now, I’m pleased to say that 0.10.3 is out! Given that I plan a massive fanfare for 0.11 (most on this to follow, but it includes a competition that only one person will be able to win…!) I’m keeping 0.10.3 pretty quiet, especially as it’s largely loads of polishes and improvements from 0.10.2, lots of new features and graphics, and the foundations for a lot of stuff that’s coming in 0.11 but isn’t entirely finished yet. Nevertheless, I do invite you all – as the blog readers, the elite of the elite! – to check it out on the downloads page, and please send me any information about bugs (major or minor) you might encounter. It should be running far more smoothly now, and with a great deal more to look at.

In the coming weeks, then, the next blog post – on January 5th – will be my yearly round-up of games played and my thoughts on them, and then the post after that – on January 26th – will be the first post exploring quest generation, i.e. creating multiple riddles and clues (and leaving room for, in the future, aspects of quests that might involve combat, for example, or diplomacy, and still ensuring those can be “slotted” into the quests at a later date), with the goal of releasing 0.11 – with the first ever procedurally generated riddles in a game – in 2025. I’m so excited, friends! Thank you all, as ever, for coming along with me on this journey, and I hope you have a fantastic break :).