Altered Alterations

Events are now functioning well, among a number of other things. Places of Worship are running way better than they were with my last post, and a number of game infrastructure things have been improved. With exams coming up, I had a burning need to get some good, satisfying game programming out of the way.

I thing Faith’s events system is going to turn out well. In Asylum, you can either see all events, or clear all events completely. This is annoying for users who only want to keep select events, instead wading through a big mess. It’s also annoying for me since the server load of everybody loading every darn event each time they enter a game is just plain dumb. In Faith, events auto-disappear after a week or two, but if you want to save an event, you can just “pin” it so it won’t disappear. Also, each event will have a “magnitude”, meaning you can see “major events”, or maybe only “massive events”, or if you’re patient, “every sneeze or gust of wind”.

Places of Worship and regions (managed on the same page) got a nice taste of javascript today. I’m actually enjoying javascript programming now that I’m working in Firefox and am a lot older and wiser than when I first tried it out years ago. Basically it allows me to do interface things that let me show a lot of stuff on the page at once without being overwhelming AND without requiring a full page reload whenever you want to see a bit more info. It looks like it’ll be good for everyone - except maybe people using old, lame, browsers. You’ve been warned, Guy Who’s Using Netscape 4.

The last two weeks have been pretty good for Faith development. Primarily my time has been going into the “Places of Worship” page. This is where you build temples, send missions to other regions of the world, and deal with other regional issues. It’s actually quite an undertaking, since Engineering Faith actually takes place in a 2D space, as opposed to Political Asylum’s lumping of all politicians into one big area.

Right now the game has four continents, and depending on certain factors, you’ll end up on one when you start. Once your faith gets large, you can send missions to other continents, allowing you to have followers in other areas. It adds some interesting dynamics to the game.

Places of Worship are mostly working now as well. You can build big temples, small ones, lavish ones, modest ones, intimidating ones, cozy ones… it’s not bad. The annoying thing is, I won’t know how many of these game mechanics I’m setting up will need to be rewritten, until I’m closer to being done. In Political Asylum, I actually had a half dozen different systems for Advisors before the current system came into place. Each time somebody found an abusable flaw that made the entire thing unbalanced. Oh well - such is game development!

I’ve slain the evil fluctuations that were plaguing my dear faiths. Populations now behave in a nice, heartwarming way: they grow for a while, and then taper off until you do something to encourage their growth. Well, the graphs warm my heart anyway. For those of you who don’t get my jabbering about graphs, just believe me that it’s way better now.

There were quite a few problems causing this, actually. For one, I turned on too many things in the game before testing them all individually. For another, I had a cool idea for regulating population that while cool, was totally not the way populations really behave. Thirdly, I was making formulas without considering very much what the graphs/maths/calculus behind them was.

Another funny thing happened in Faith, which shows how it’s starting to have some character. I noticed that as time went on, my faiths were all getting pitifully low “economy” scores. My people were lazy bums! I took a look at the default laws and values in the game, and noticed something was missing that exists as part of most societies - “Hard work encouraged”. So I quickly added it into my admin panel, and economies started to go to normal.

I’ve been working on Faith in 15 and 20 minute blocks throughout the week whenever I’ve been studying or working for long enough for my vision to blur, or some such. The last week in Faith development has been almost entirely fixing bugs and adding things to troubleshoot this problem. I’ve gotten a lot better understanding of my creation though, having now watched more than 8000 simulated years of behaviour!

I was quite productive this weekend in both schoolwork and Engineering Faith. I have Beings of Worship working now, which means you can define the gods, heroes, and whatever else your people will worship. It took a fair while to get a system that crammed the massive variety of beings people might worship into a simple little discription. Some details need to be added (such as the concept of an evil being) but it’s going pretty well.

In addition, I did some testing to see exactly how all this stuff I’d set up was behaving. As it turns out, it’s behaving pretty psychotically. I set up a graph so you could see your faith’s progress over time, and took a look at how my three test accounts have been doing. My first account was doing quite normally. My second, and third though, had really bizarre spikes in their properties at regular intervals. The third also had a quite lame spike in population and subsequent plummet that can only be described as retarded.

I spent some time and tweaked some values, and it seems like the spike/drop behaviour is caused by my code for birth and death, and I have a feeling the weird downward-spike-and-resume behaviour is a bug in my graphing code. While I expected things to be behaving really weirdly (since I haven’t tested any of that stuff yet) it was amusing to actually see my bugs and graphed out like that. The game is complicated enough now that it’s starting to take a life of its own.

Now it gets serious.

Altering Time’s yearly makeover is done, and Engineering Faith is, as expected, the focus of 2005. “Faithful Engineering” has been launched, a full-fledged weblog to track the development progress. You can now expect fairly regular updates, which can be monitored through any RSS newsreader from my new news feed.

I will write here about progress, insights, and new ideas that go into the game. While I will continue to post in the Forum about it where appropriate, I will try to keep any new info here for everybody to see.

At the moment, I’m aiming for testing to begin by the end of the year. There’s no reason that can’t be accomplished - I’ve learned a lot in the last two years about web development and games, and I’m enjoying putting it to use.

Now back to coding!