Weekly Dev Update – November 17th, 2014

Daniel

Hi, this week I’m so frelling done with faces. They will still need more work later on but for now it will have to do. At least now they look somewhat like humans. As we were discussing on the forums, non human facial features will be added later, its mainly a matter of putting the time into making them.

In total it can currently generate 645 922 816 different faces. Multiplying with this will also later on be stuff like skin colors, hair styles and asymmetries and different scaling and positions of individual features which will all each increase the amount of possible faces exponentially.

Adam

Given the maximum badassitude of Daniel’s new character portraits, my first priority was to integrate and automate their generation into recruit applications for a start. Needless to say, it breathes some life into everything they’re attached to.

I’ve also set the groundwork for missions by performing actual mission execution. I still need to integrate mission reports so we can benefit from Dave’s wonderful procedural mission storytelling.

Finally, I added analytics. This’ll allow me to automatically receive reports of people’s hardware specs, average session length and all sorts of important information. Before we hand anyone a build, I’ll make sure to add a prompt to enable it, but this analytics system doesn’t map users to data so it’s not like I can use it to find our personal things about people.

Dave

Disclaimer: I lost 4 days to a hardware failure, and my machine was out of commission (had to surf the web from my phone ugh). No work was lost. Fortunately, I’m up and running again.

Despite that, I hooked up the outcomes of procedural stories. They can result in items (resources, parts, weapons, artifacts), relationship changes, damage, combat, trait unlocks, nothing, or lead to other stories. Pretty much anything can happen as an outcome . Keep in mind the procedural generation factors in the personality traits, stats, skills, etc of a character because so much of the story is about how the character reacts to a situation, which leads to a new situation.

So right now, I’m in the testing phase and putting the whole thing through its paces. There’s a lot of minor things left, such as doing the pronoun replacement. And this just isn’t gender, it’s also perspective (the stories can be written from first person or third person). So a lot of I/she/he me/him/her my/his/her stuff to do, which I’ve done before with the conversation gen. But I’m pulling it all out and writing a more proper and uniform method of embedding these codes into the text so the stories are written using proper grammar, perspective, and gender.

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