State of the game (April 3, 2022)


Hi everyone!

It's been a while so I'd like to write another update for people who don't check on our Discord server. In the last dev diary ( https://demiansky.itch.io/songs-of-the-eons/devlog/341192/january-2022 ) I mentioned that we're porting the game over to a custom engine. This process has been largely completed, with the most important systems like climate and vegetation already in place.

Many, like elevation, still need further tuning to get them to the same level of quality as that found in 0.2, but that is an iterative process and won't stop work on features closer related to gameplay.

(an example of elevation generation needing further tuning, note the straightness of rivers and blobbiness of coastlines)

Climate in particular ported over almost 1:1:



Plants stayed largely the same too:


Some of the systems changed a lot (tho, unlike elevation and erosion, largely for the better). For example, bedrock and stone layers. Previously, tiles were assigned a general category of rocks (acid plutonics, basic volcanics, limestone, etc) which were then further defined for the purpose of the local 3d view. That lead to tiles having duplicate data, as we couldn't modify old rock generation without rewriting it.
The two are now merged and rock types have explicit, concrete names, like andesite, gabbro, peridotite, etc.

Among new features is the ability to view local elevation at a subtile level within the tile inspector:


This should help with finding natural harbors or defensive positions, without having to load the city view itself.

On a related note, SotE uses square tiles now. These are much easier to work with when it comes to rendering and cache oriented optimizations so they'll be useful going forward. However, as it turned out, they do come with their own set of problems -- our old approach to erosion doesn't seem to mesh very well with them.

Lastly,  some of the things that were difficult (or impossible) to mod when we were using Unity are now exposed in human readable .lua files. This helps a lot with development as we can modify them more easily without having to recompile the game or wait for Unity's serialization to finish:

(some of the stone age trade goods)


(moddable biomes)


As usual, Solitarian streamed some of these developments:

As you can see, these videos are from 2+ weeks ago. I apologize for not posting them sooner.  I was originally hoping to only post this dev diary after Solitarian streams a build with the local 3d view included, but I decided to post it now instead, after being asked about it by people on our Discord server.


My work right now is split between incorporating feedback on the world generator and working on societies. I'm hoping to have some exciting news regarding them within the next two weeks. I'll keep you guys updated and post another dev diary when SotE has interactive gameplay features.

~ Cal

Get Songs of the Eons, 0.2

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

(+2)

The wiki is gone and there are a lot of old posts. Has this been abandoned?

(1 edit) (+1)

I found this on Solitarian's channel, on his latest stream episode(11 September 2022):

Commenter: is this abandoned?

Solitarian: The game? Yes. Both of the developers are no longer working on it. The game was a one-man show for a long time, and eventually that situation ended and the thing was de facto dead.

Commenter: sad to hear, as someone who wants to play / build a simulator myself, could you inform me of the main causes of failure? is it the performance costs of such a simulation, lack of market, etc? To what degree is the source code open-sourced so we can learn from it? Thanks in advance.

Solitarian:

There were two developers. One had a family and full-time job and just quit working on the project because his responsibilities elsewhere were more important. The other developer was doing all the work while not getting enough money for it to get by, so he got a full-time job. There also came a point where a lot had been developed, but then developer #1 came back briefly and didn't like it, so a big chunk of it was just removed. That disappointed developer #2 and both realized that the situation was not tenable and stopped the project.

As far as open-source stuff goes, I do not know. You'd have to ask the developers that. I think their Discord server is still active.