Howdy again! Feel free to Join the Discord![discord.gg] if you wish to follow the development more closely, and if you want to help the game succeed, feel free to and Wishlist Peasant Simulator on Steam!. Thank you.


Rather than including the change list at the bottom of every post, I think it would be more prudent to simply include the current build of the game at the top. This is currently the 148th Steam build.

I recently conducted a farming Benchmarking test with a three players total, and the systems seemed to scale very well! We created a plot of several thousand tilled soil patches, and the game / server didn't blink. So performance is looking good! It will be exciting to see large groups of players coordinating to farm large swathes of land.

The cool part about this is that you need to move all of the sticks, rocks, and tree logs etc, off of the farmable soil to be able to till it. So it wasn't simply spamming soil plots, it was several players making meaningful changes to the game world, in a fashion similar to the final gameplay, and the benchmarking passed with flying colors.

Items in the game world can now rot into other items!
Each perishable item in the game world maintains an internal tracker of how rotten they are, and when this value hits zero, they destroy themselves, and can optionally leave behind piles of effluent and other items.

For example, Plant Fibers, which you get from chopping down grass and other foliage, will now perish into 2 "Rot" items, after 30 seconds:
Rot is also a perishable item, but it rots into nothingness:
For the sake of testing, Deer corpses rot into "flesh" and "flesh" rots straight back into deer corpses, back and forth infinitely.

None of these numbers of behaviors are final of course, just testing values. In the real game rot and perishability will be a slow and gradual process that takes days to occur. It isn't supposed to be a surprise to the player.

Interestingly enough, I can respond to entities dying due to rot very easily - perhaps propagating some sort of "disease" value into the immediate surroundings. FLECS makes this sort of behavior really easy to accomplish technically

I've done a lot of work to move buildings over to FLECS, and that's looking good now.
1. You create construction blueprints that require items and labor
2. The building then consumes items added to it which are required to build it.
3. Once the building has its required items, you then apply labor to it (this will be via the hammer in the future).
4. Once it gains enough labor, the building will become fully constructed, and live within the ECS world.

This will need to be stress tested at some point in the near future, but it should hold up as well as everything else does currently.

1. I've had to refactor item movement a little bit, just to make it a bit easier to actually grab and locate items in the game world, instead of aiming exactly at them.
2. I've added a subtle auto aim to item picking up which makes it slightly easier to grab stuff now
3. The system traces into the world, and grabs the closest item to where you're aiming, so even if you're looking next to but not quite at a specific item, your hands will grab the item. I noticed that it was mentally quite taxing having to exactly aim at an item every single time I wanted to pick it up - this helps reduce that mental load.

Here you can see two traces coming off the aim point, seeking the two nearest sticks.

4. This did however highlight a new problem - its actually sort of a nightmare to place items back into the world now. Mainly because this new method of grabbing them makes drop spamming really hard, and secondly because if you're holding 15 items, the player won't want to perform 15 actions to drop them all. So now you can simply right click once, and all of those items will be dropped into the world in one go, roughly around where you're aiming with some random scattering. If you're aiming at nothing or into the air, they will be dropped around your feet.

And here is what it looks like. This is a collection of 5 sticks that I have dropped back into the game world.



Items now keep track of what other items are "close" to them in the game world, shown by the orange line in the above screenshot.

I don't do anything with this information yet, but it will be instrumental in fire and disease propagation. The basic idea being that if something is on fire, it already knows what is next to it, and simply can increase its "temperature" value. That other entity can then combust into flame once its temperature is high enough, and repeat the process. This is an expression of "The Space Time" tradeoff - by storing these connections long before I need to use them, instead of calculating them when the object catches fire, I can make fire propagation very cheap when it eventually needs to occur.

Thanks for reading! As always if you want to support the development of Peasant Simulator, feel free to Join the Discord![discord.gg], and Wishlist Peasant Simulator on Steam!

Howdy again! Feel free to Join the Discord![discord.gg] to follow the dev more closely. If you know anyone who likes to read technical game dev blog posts like these, feel free to shoot them a link, I'd appreciate it.

I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate the 138th Steam Upload to the game since its inception.
It's really surreal to see this number slowly tick up day by day. It will still take thousands of updates yet, but the game is slowly taking shape.

Over the last two weeks or so, I've done a mountain of work to move my logic out of Unreals standard framework, and into a "ECS" centric framework, with FLECS.[www.flecs.dev]

One of the primary goals of Peasant Simulator is to let players live out their medieval lives in a world full of "things". A "Thing" can be really anything interactable. A tree, a bush, an apple that you eat, a bloomery currently smelting iron, a corpse decaying in a forest, an item inside an inventory, etc. The technical term for a "thing" is an Entity.

The Systems (the S part of ECS) that govern how these Entities interact with each other, I'm loosely calling "The Background Simulation". This background simulation will determine how fast food rots, where wolves go to hunt, how flammable things are and how fire progresses through them, how fast crops grow, etc.

Everything with a Blue Box around it, exists inside of the background Sim.

Everything in the game world is comprised of Components (Entity+ Component + System) which store their data, and are manipulated inside of this Background Sim, then exposed to the larger gameplay framework of Unreal for rendering and networking.

With FLECS handling it, I can fully utilize most of the CPU's horsepower.

Without getting too technical, an ECS framework is perfect for laying out your game worlds worth of data in a way that is easily digestible for a modern CPU to absolutely crunch through, utilizing all of its cores, and all of its speed.

This is a bit of digression, but 4.5 Ghz on 12+ cores with 32 gig of main memory is an *astronomic* amount of speed and resources that modern machines have access to - and its an absolute crime that we're still yet to standardize dev practises that fully utilize these resources.

ECS is one way to unlock this horse power, BUT ...

Its a very "different" way of making a game compared to the status quo. In exchange for this differentness, you gain SPEED.

By breaking the things in the game world apart into their constituent pieces, the CPU is able to process each piece with greater efficiency, for example:

A Fish isnt a fish - its an Npc{} with Age{Value}, WaterNavigating{} and DropsOnDeath{FishMeat}.
A Crop isn't a crop, its a WorldStatic{} with Age{Value}, CurrentWetness{Value} and Harvestable{RequiredAge}

Crops growing, and drying out.

The Background Sim then looks for all things with Age, and increases that value. All things with Wetness, and decreases that value. Very simple operations applied to many thousands of things, very efficiently. Once a Harvestable{} whose Age{} is greater than their RequiredAge is damaged, it drops fully grown food into the game world, and removes itself from the sim.

With this framework I can now setup the game world so that every fish in every river is slowly maturing, every item left about can slowly decay, trees and crops can grow by the thousands, and each building you place can maintain health, repairs, etc.

Usually you need to fake this sort of stuff, and use smoke and mirrors to hide the exchange while the players not looking - with ECS you get your cake and can eat it too.

Right now, there are a few simulated attributes, and there will be more to come.

1. Crops progress their growth, up to a maximum value.
   
2. Things that are "wet" (crops) dry out slowly, and in the case of crops, will actually die if their "wetness value" ever becomes zero.
   
3. Buildings maintain an internal health value, and can receive damage. When this value hits zero they drop building materials into the world which can be gathered.
   
4. WorldItems ALSO maintain this same internal internal health, but use it to "change" into other items when destroyed. Trees Change into a log + some sticks, rocks change into chipped rock, etc.

This is a relatively small list at the moment, but the framework is there. I'm still tweaking it and testing weird edge cases, playing devils advocate to myself, and looking for flaws. But it's looking pretty good so far.

Here is what some example code looks like, for handling "death" of things in the Simulation.
Firstly, we apply damage to the Entity:

Then, for anyone that died as a result of that operation, who also drops items on death, drop the items (Add Static Item To World):

Players need to know where stuff is. Wolves need to know where the closest deer is. NPCs need to know where the nearest Log is, so they can chop it to wood, etc. To do this efficiently, I've implemented an R-Tree acceleration structure to make this quick and efficient. I didn't write it myself, that's quite above my skill level, but thankfully there are some good R-Trees available for use online, which I've repurposed.

A player querying the game world for the closest three "Things" - you can see the green lines connecting their "face" to the "things" in the game world.

Knowing what's "close" to a location is a difficult problem, but thankfully that is now solved for Peasant Simulator. Now things like campfires will be able to set things on fire that sit too close to them, animals will be able to hunt, and perhaps even players will be able to "track" entities around the game world if their tracking skill is high enough. I'm yet to write these features, but it's looking good.

R-Tree's also have an interesting property in that they can be streamed on and off the disk, so there are potentially streaming related optimizations to be had there, but I'm not looking into that just yet.

This is the next technical roadblock I need to solve. It's a multiplayer game! Which means that the connected clients need to be able to look at food on the floor, and see that it is 20% cooked, or 80% rotten. This is my next feature I will be working on.

That's all for now, thanks for reading if you got this far! Again feel free to Join the Discord![discord.gg] and say hi, pitch ideas and features, or just lurk and follow along. And again,if you know anyone who likes to read this sort of technical content, feel free to forward it their way. See you in the next one!