Game Development: UI Scaling

[jorb]

We've been developing, and here's what's new.



New Implementations
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• Added support for scaleable UI. A neatly packaged pull request from user ElSid gave us a good start toward implementing UI-scaling in the client, and so we did, though the proper implementation and fixes took us a bit longer than we had hoped. Thank you, ElSid!
• There is now a video setting to increase the size of the UI, useful if you're using a higher resolution monitor, and I (jorb) have also begun working over all UI elements, redrawing them in 4x their historical resolutions, to actually have higher res versions to meaningfully present. This is a pretty big task, and I have only gotten some elements done (the main window frame, for example) but I intend to work through all of it. Elements that I haven't reworked are simply scaled up programatically, and won't look great, but will at least work. The biggest single task in this would be to convert all inventory icons to higher resolutions, and I don't expect to finish that any time soon, but the ambition is to at least draw new items in higher resolution, and gradually convert old ones.
• Old custom clients that have not implemented the latest push to the "old" branch of the client repository risk crashing due to changes to the resource format.
• Note that you need to restart the client for UI-scale changes to take effect.

Key Fixes
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• We've significantly increased the internal logging of siege events (building, repairing, firing siege engines, &c).
• When we added a new wound recently, the alchemy ingredient effects changed more than we had hoped, due to another change introduced in the same patch. We have now verified that alchemy should not completely redefine recipes when new wounds are introduced, rather, only a small subset of wound-effects should be reassigned to the new wound.
• Archery towers now target the siege machine repaired the longest time ago, rather than the closest one, and also have a UI indicating when they will fire next. We are considering mechanics to allow explicit aiming of the towers.

Small Fixes
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• Rock Dove Meat uses the correct meat icon when asked for by ancestors.
• Birdhouse text describes the correct mechanic for homesteading Rock Doves (Hold the bird, and right-click the Birdhouse).
• Rock Dove eggs can be put (back) into Dovecotes.
• Fixed distinction between rock dove bloody mess and chicken bloody mess. There now is none. Some ancestors were confused by that.

As always, if you liked what we did here: Support the patch.

Today's Patch Items, for the fair price of $9 is the "Big Kahuna"

$9 Light your tiki-torch, and offer up a sacrifice of coconuts and surfboards to the Big Kahuna, god of the volcano!

All Gold subscribers have been awarded the "Big Kahuna". free of charge.

In the Pipe
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• Again urging any custom client maker who wishes to stay relevant to get with the new rendering times. Support for the old resources will be dropped at some point.
• An update to the server-client protocol is the next project in the pipe. It is a relatively limited scope project to allow for better definitions of objects in relation to other objects (E.g. bubbling retort standing on lit tripod burner with variable materials, standing on an Alchemist's table. That kind of stuff). One upside is that it could allow us to add variable materials to tools and equipment. This is necessary for the next project after, namely Object Controlled Objects, which we consider the next major milestone in development.
• Time to... like us on Facebook?
• Time to... follow us on Twitter?

UPDATE YOUR CLIENTS!

Enjoy!

[Zentetsuken]

[SnuggleSnail]

If you're trying to stop us from using soaker rams for archery towers, this made it way easier to use soaker rams xd

[jorb]

If you're trying to stop us from using soaker rams for archery towers, this made it way easier to use soaker rams xd

How so?

[KwonChiMin]

If you're trying to stop us from using soaker rams for archery towers, this made it way easier to use soaker rams xd

How so?

They will just build some siege engines and insta repair those that are not meant to be fired in.

[loftar]

They will just build some siege engines and insta repair those that are not meant to be fired in.

Well yeah, but if they keep repairing them, they also won't be able to use them.

[SnuggleSnail]

Basically just use way more rams and sequence the repairs so the real ram is never the oldest. You need avg, like, 4.2 rams per tower, but there's way more space to put them now, and it's way easier to split them so they're not focus firing the same ram. IMO, the expensive bit was never really making the soaker ram/s, it was repairing them every 5min for 2 hours straight while you make the 3 necessary movements on the real ram. If you siege from a corner, theoretically you should only need to worry about 3-4 towers, unless they get some super range ones. Keep in mind, atm 1 token worth of gold = about 80 rams worth of materials

That said, archery towers are kindof irrelevant on their own. As far as I'm concerned, their only job was to increase the resource cost of sieging people who were too lazy, or didn't know to build catapults. The only difference in my mind between using a soaker ram to circumvent archery towers instead of catapults to destroy them was I would have to turn up on a vandal alt a few hours earlier to actually fire them... And some frustration when the archery tower outranged the catapult, making it completely worthless.

Kindof a side note, but I think single wall villages are obscenely easy to siege right now(if the people getting sieged can't fight), but mutli wall villages with compartmentalization are obscenely hard. In general buffing archery towers seems to benefit people with more walls more than it benefits people with fewer walls because there's no real cost to building/repairing towers at 20 layers of walls.

[shubla]

I (jorb) have also begun working over all UI elements, redrawing them in 4x their historical resolutions, to actually have higher res versions to meaningfully present

But what will you do when 8K screens will become common? Draw them all over again? When will we get vectorized graphics?
Great job nevertheless.

[loftar]

But what will you do when 8K screens will become common? Draw them all over again? When will we get vectorized graphics?

To be fair, beyond a certain pixel density, we probably don't really need actual per-pixel information anyway, and if you mean to be playing Haven on your 80" 8K television, you probably don't need or want UI scaling to begin with.

[Apocoreo]

Good update, we need polish like this.