System Integration and Faces

Things are moving a little slow since each of the new systems rely on each other.  It is a bit like trying to get a bunch of scaffolds to lean on each other at the same time before they can be bolted together.  So that is where I am at the moment.  The new job site framework seems like it will work as expected and I’ve added some elements to make it easy to assign peasants to job sites.  In the new job site menu you can sort potential workers by name, family name, and skill level in the slots associated skill.  This way you can truly choose the best person for a job, or the best person for training a skill, or just that specific person you wanted to assign to that role.  The following screen shot gives you a glimpse of this, although it’s still a work in progress:

screen_081.png

Here's the worker selection box with sorting options. Currently it is sorting by the Forestry skill for all available workers.

As you can see all my test peasants are named “Work”.  I also added a few other features to make getting information about the objects and entities easier.  You can now right click on anything in the game screen to get detailed information about it.  The most important entity gets the forefront of information, such that creatures will override plants and constructions.  Here’s an example of a person standing over a young tree:

screen_082.png

Here's the tile viewing window. A peasant is shown with detailed information. The person's current statistics are displayed by bars on the left.

As you can see, I never gave them a proper birthdate, so they are exceptionally old.  Here’s and example of a plant:

screen_083.png

Here's the tile viewing window for a plant.

And finally, here’s the player’s character where you can also see objects underneath his feet.

screen_084.png

Here's the tile viewing window for the player's character. Also showing the objects that the character is standing over.

As you may have noticed, the peasant has a portrait.  This is not a prepared image, but a procedurally generated portrait based on that person’s data.  Just by looking at a person’s portrait you will be able to get some information about them.  I got the idea for this working with Chernoff faces on a social-communication research project I did as an undergraduate.

The color of their body indicates their rank (peasant-brown in this case). Their happiness is indicated by their smile or frown, as well as their eyebrow slant.  Their nutrition level will be visible based on how wide (fat) their face and body are.  Malnourished peasants will have quite skinny faces, while the well-to-do will have quite a chubby appearance.  The others factors are based on an individuals personal appearance data.  Eventually this data will be based on normal distributions with the means set based on a person’s original kingdom.  Such that people from the same original kingdom will tend to look more similar to each other.  Over time this will be less true as kingdoms are broken, conquered, and consumed into larger ones.  But it will at least help create the illusion of racial origins and culture on the Fief island continent.

So here’s some randomly generated faces.  Each one has a different happiness level, but the same healthy nutrition level.  All other variables were left to vary at the computer’s whim.

The beginnings of faces for the townspeople.

The beginnings of faces for the townspeople.

 

 

 

Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.