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Peasant Simulator

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Peasant Simulator

Peasant Simulator is an open-world medieval sandbox. As serf or liege, smith, trade, farm, build, or conquer your way to fortune, glory, and a thriving medieval kingdom. Use your skills in construction, warfare, and crafting to build great towns and castles, then defend them from your enemies.

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DevUpdate #8: 64x64 KM Gameworld

18. apr.

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Build #205

Much of the recent work has focused on developing the game's underlying framework, with Build #205 specifically emphasizing improvements to level generation creation systems, streaming, and authentication.

The size of the Sandbox

I can now confidently confirm that the final game world will span at least 64×64 km!

This screenshot shows a sky-level top-down view of a 32 km terrain bridge I've built to test the map's scale. What you're seeing represents just one quarter of the final game world, which will extend to at least 64×64 km. Achieving this scale required significant testing and fundamental changes to how world modifications are created. The solution boils down to:

Tracking the location of anything "Removed from the Base World" - In a way that matches on both the client and the server, and in a way that is internally consistent.
As players move around the game world, generating a list of potential objects/location pairs(trees, rocks, etc.) to spawn around them.
Ensuring this list is ALWAYS generated identically on both client AND servers
Checking each potential spawn against a "Removed" database
Preventing spawns for any objects previously removed

This means when you destroy a tree or pick up a rock, that item stays gone. Even if you leave the area and return later, the system remembers what you've removed and prevents regeneration. The system also works perfectly with hand-placed, non-regenerating objects, giving me the best of both worlds.

This is an example of how the above, while being seemingly straight forward, can go wildly wrong.
This image shows a location on the client, and the server, as binary - and we can see that there stands a single 1 out of place. These two should match. This imperceptibly small difference in binary totally breaks this system - so I've had to take great care to ensure that the client, and the server, internally, each agree on what has and has not been removed from the game world.

Procedural Generation and Persistence!

Building on the above system, I've begun work on terrain-based procedural spawning—essentially a proto-biome system. This allows certain trees to spawn only in forests and similar environment-specific spawning rules. I'm leveraging Unreal's "PCG" framework to achieve this, and its looking very promising.

The ultimate goal is going to be to create workflows and tools that allow me to procedurally fill the world with content that is designed to be exactly where it is supposed to be, and not fully randomly generated.

While the world will leverage procedural generation, its layout, landmasses, etc, will not change or be random. They will be fixed in layout for all players. The exact position of trees, sticks, rocks, etc, will be procedural however. This lets me craft and direct a specific world with specific landmarks and borders, while not having to take 400 years to build it.

Unreal 5.5 upgrade

I've successfully migrated from Unreal 5.4 to 5.5. The transition broke a few things initially, but everything's stable now and running smoothly.

Shovels!

I've added "Shovel" as a new item type that allows players to collect certain ground objects like rocks, and also to gather soil, gravel, and other earthen materials based on terrain type. This will be essential for construction projects requiring specific amounts of materials (e.g., "300 pounds of soil" or "150 pounds of gravel").

Hand Hold / Equipping rework !

I've completely reworked the game's core UX. Now you can simply press E to pick up any item you're looking at, and once in your hands, you can attack with it. So you can strike enemies with a fish, an apple, or a log, and each is capable of having unique attack data.

These represent the sort of "generic hand held" items - but then there are other more specific items which function specifically as combat weaponry - swords, spears, axes, bows, etc.

Additionally, I've implemented "thrust" item types such as pitchforks and spears, which offer unique functionality. Spears can now "skewer" meat, allowing players to carry multiple pieces at once, while pitchforks can gather hay and plant fiber efficiently.

Hotbar improvements!

I've fixed several hotbar bugs, with numerous UX improvements to make gameplay clearer and provide better feedback about equipped items.

Character Hand Upgrades!

I've upgraded the player hands to fully animatable character hands. Currently using the Unreal mannequin hands, this implementation utilizes the standard Unreal rig, meaning I can easily swap to masculine or feminine hands later without breaking anything. This groundwork also supports future clothing layering and character customization.

Developer cheat codes!

I've added /pktele and /pkfly commands to help with development. These won't be in the final game, but they've been invaluable during prototyping, making it much easier for me to navigate and test this massive world.

Player Persistence

Players' characters now remain in the world when they log out. Eventually, I'll implement behaviors like having them automatically return home and lock their doors, but for now, they simply stand in place. Most importantly, when that player rejoins, they can repossess their character and continue where they left off—a feature made possible by my new authentication system.

Authentication.

While not the most exciting feature visually, the game is now capable of authenticating players.

The server needs a reliable way to identify returning players to grant them control over their characters, houses, kingdoms, etc. To accomplish this, I've implemented a simple username/password system where the client hashes these credentials and sends only the hash to the server during login.
This means your actual username and password never leave your machine.

For example, "MyCoolUsername|MyCoolPassword" when hashed with MD5 becomes the unique ID "9726dfb4e28603488c044018d65fcde5". The server can then use this to confirm your identity and restore your in-game possessions. This is admittedly a primitive system that I'll evolve throughout development, but it's perfect for my current prototyping needs.

Thanks for Reading!

Sorry for the lack of images, but this update was taking a bit to write a blog about and I didn't want to keep letting that all pile up. Have a good one!

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Peasant Simulator

Does the game have a single player part?

灭资兴无

23. des. 2021 kl. 17.36

Generelle diskusjoner

DevUpdate #7: Cooking, Crafting, Fire, Kingdoms.

7. apr.

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Build #157

Big post, lots of changes.

Fire Propagation

Fire is something I've wanted in the game, and I've started including it into the background sim. It behaves about as you would expect, the fire searches for nearby entities, checks if they are flamable, and if so, lights them on fire - repeating recursively.

Interestingly this has helped highlight some other performance issues I was having, and have since cleaned up! As a result, crops now are 13x more efficient then they were before! Which is great, because the game world needs to support hundreds of thousands of them.

Fire hasn't been added in a general case yet, its just something I'm testing in the editor - but as a proof of concept it does work. Fire represents unique challenges to the games design, and in a PvP sandbox every engagement could simply boil down to nuking all the forests in a region with fire. Which would be cool, but it needs to be balanced.

Kingdoms, and Territory

I've started working on one of the games major features - Kingdoms, Territories, and Holdings.
The basic idea is that each player can stake a claim to a specific area of land, and then physically update that border over time by securing new "Flags" into it.

As you can see in the video, territories won't simply be circles or squares, but actually organic borders that can be moved, and contested in War. If an unsecured flag is uprooted by a player or an NPC, then the territory will re-calculate based upon the flags left, allowing you to actually usurp other lands.

Eventually, the goal is to use territories to assert "ownership" over regions, and the resources they contain. Lords will also be able to specify what actions that Neutral and Allied players and NPCs within their territories are able to physically perform. If you want to allow "Peons" to farm, but not open the Armory, the system will eventually support this.

A wishlist feature for this could be storing the controlled territory over time in a "history" timeline, so anyone can explore the historical timeline of the area ... but that is for a future blog.

Physical Cooking

Physical cooking is in the game now, and it works by actually placing items on, or in other heat sources:

When placing meat next to a heat source, like in this image, the heat source will slowly impart heat to the item. If this item is "Heat Transformable" - it will change into a new item based on a series of rules. In the case of meat, it will become cooked!

Here I'm debug drawing the range of the fireplace. Because the blue rectangle is within the orange circle, the heat of the fire slowly imparts temperature onto the meat.

If the meat was placed closer to the red sphere, it would burn and convert into burned meat.

The funny thing about this is that after implementing it, I immediately felt like I was cooking on a grill as I kept adjusting meat to be close enough to the fire to cook quickly, but not too close to burn.

Cooking is handled by a list of Heat Transformable rules:

In this case, Raw Meat can be come three things, 1. Cooked Meat, 2. Dried Meat, or 3. Charcoal.

Which item it becomes depends on what temperature range it exists within, and for how long. As with all ECS things, this logic will scale to tends of thousands of items being cooked in the game world simultaneously.

Proximity Crafting

Following along from the cooking theme, I've also added "Proximity Crafting" to the game. Keeping with the theme of physically deforming items in the game world, to craft anything you place the constituent items on the floor in close proximity together, and then strike them with a hammer.

When a new player enters a world, they can pick up a rock - which functions as a primitive hammer. If they strike another rock with this hammer, this creates a chipped rock on the floor - their first primitive axe.

Eventually striking a pile of lumber and rope etc, will combine them into varying furniture. The system needs more work but functionally its there.

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for reading! In the coming weeks I'll be improving the kingdom system, adding user interface to interact with it, naming, and server wide notifications for when a new kingdom is founded, or destroyed.

Discord: Join the Discord![discord.gg]
Steam Wishlist: Wishlist Peasant Simulator on Steam!
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Peasant Simulator

DevUpdate #6: Rot, Construction, and Farming

29. mars

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.

Build #148

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.

Farming Benchmarking.

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.

Rotting and Perishability

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

Building Construction and Deconstruction.

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.

Item Movement Polish.

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.

Close item graph

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!

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!

Peasant Simulator

Abandoned?

Is this still being worked on or has it been abandoned?

Biggy

10. mars kl. 8.08

Generelle diskusjoner

All the screen shots with people hiding their faces by looking away causes me to fear the use of crappy models

Speaking of models, will there be tasteful nudity in the game (i.e. female breasts) and dating simulation of some kind or do we just auto-procreate? The game seems similar to several other medieval games but there's always room for more games when that NEW game OFFERS more rather than just copying existing ideas. I am following this and hoping for the best.

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