Medieval Engineers

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kjbrona
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Medieval Engineers

Post by kjbrona »

New game just announced from Keen Software House who made Space Engineers.
Medieval Engineers

Here is an interview with the CEO of KSH that give a lot more info about where ME is heading.
Medieval Engineers - Developer Interview

So they are going to make survival mode in ME much more like a lot of the current batch of "survival" games. Find a rock, break a tree, make a stone tool, collect resources to upgrade and advance. They are going to have a more realistic inventory system so you will have to build things to help you transport materials. Real-ish physics will be applied to all blocks and will be recalculated if something is placed on the block (cart driving over a bridge). Tunnels will need to be shored up or they will collapse. They have also come up with compound blocks so blocks can better fit inside other blocks.
It looks like Medieval contraptions will be built in a more BTW way (gear blocks, axles, pulleys, ropes, winches, windmills, watermills, etc). They will have "barbarians" as your reason to build. The only "downside" is that it sounds like they might not be able to do actual flowing water but they are going to try.

They will be releasing the modding API and SDK when they release the early Alpha on Steam as well as the Steam Workshop.

I have seem a lot of the things that people have built in the workshop for SE so I am really looking forward to this game.
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Taleric
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Taleric »

"New game just announced from Keen Software House who made Space Engineers."

Nice but dang it SE is not done and I want a crap ton more survival added to IT. Give me some void shields so I can do proper tall ship battles, a jump drive mechanic and several life support elements (radiation, hostile AI ect) and I will be satisfied.

I can appreciate Keen's desire to capitalize on SE's success and see they have set their youtube content makers into full ME hype; I will not buy into ME till I am satisfied with SE.

I want a space survival sim...
hordekips
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by hordekips »

Do they really have the resources to work on two quite ambitious projects at the same time? As Space Engineers is not really done yet should they really be focusing on another game?

I know the engine is already there and the basic concept behind this is the same as SE only on ground ,so this is just going to be an over-glorified mod, but is this really the best usage of their resources considering they have not even finished their last project?

I mean I like the idea, but the fact that they haven't even finished their last project yet makes me a little cautious...

EDIT: Looked some more into this and it seems this is more than just an over-glorified mod as there have been large overhauls to the physics engine (not just it being on ground).
Still believe it will spread the DEV's resources too thin
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FaceFoiled
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by FaceFoiled »

That just looked like EverQuest Next Landmark.
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Katalliaan
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Katalliaan »

hordekips wrote:Do they really have the resources to work on two quite ambitious projects at the same time? As Space Engineers is not really done yet should they really be focusing on another game?
According to Marek Rosa (Keen's founder), there's about 40 people working on the games and they're still hiring.

I probably won't touch it, but for a different reason: we already have a ton of voxel games with similar settings. While Keen have a solid engine to work with, I'm not sure the game will be interesting enough to hold my attention.
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FlowerChild
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by FlowerChild »

I can't say this is of any interest to me as while Keen has a nice(ish) engine, they've yet to demonstrate the ability to create any kind of gameplay.

I basically don't play Space Engineers at all anymore due to it being pretty much exclusively a sandbox game. The "survival mode" is super thin and I keep waiting on an update that I'm not sure is ever going to come when they finally add some gameplay depth to it.
Katalliaan wrote:I probably won't touch it, but for a different reason: we already have a ton of voxel games with similar settings.
Man, when I see statements like the above I seriously despair that people may have learned nothing from BTW or my other mods :)
VegasGoat
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by VegasGoat »

kjbrona wrote:They are going to have a more realistic inventory system so you will have to build things to help you transport materials.
Whenever I hear "realistic" regarding video games I cringe, because it usually means tedious. So that holds no interest for me.
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Katalliaan
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Katalliaan »

FlowerChild wrote:Man, when I see statements like the above I seriously despair that people may have learned nothing from BTW or my other mods :)
Well, your mods are also another part of my thought process; a lot of these games end up being either laughably easy or grindier than a Korean MMO. I've already seen the direction Space Engineers is heading, and I'm not sure I'm all that interested in that kind of game but set in medieval times.
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DaveYanakov
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by DaveYanakov »

Recently I was playing around with Warr in Minetest where we were working on adding things like mechanical power and natural hazards such as coal gas. I found out that without a force actively working against you, even a major threat like coal gas causing a torch placed in the wrong spot to blow up in your face, it's really, really boring. The creeper is what made Minecraft worth playing and its the one thing I'm seeing the vast majority of games avoid like the plague.

Taleric, SE recently overhauled armor and completely changed the damage models as a result. It is now entirely possible to do large ship slugfests without silly technobabble energy shielding
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Sarudak
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Sarudak »

DaveYanakov wrote:I found out that without a force actively working against you, even a major threat like coal gas causing a torch placed in the wrong spot to blow up in your face, it's really, really boring. The creeper is what made Minecraft worth playing and its the one thing I'm seeing the vast majority of games avoid like the plague.
Yeah I think this is something that 7 days to die got really really right and most voxel games seem to be lacking. That is they lack any kind of actual game.
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FlowerChild
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by FlowerChild »

Katalliaan wrote: Well, your mods are also another part of my thought process; a lot of these games end up being either laughably easy or grindier than a Korean MMO. I've already seen the direction Space Engineers is heading, and I'm not sure I'm all that interested in that kind of game but set in medieval times.
Yeah, and I'm with you on that, just whether it's thematically medieval or what have you really doesn't make any difference to me in evaluating a game. It's all about the gameplay, and in this case, it's where I find Keen doesn't have a proven track record.

They're technically competent to be sure, but I've seen very little in the way of game design with their stuff as of yet.
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Stormweaver
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Stormweaver »

VegasGoat wrote:
kjbrona wrote:They are going to have a more realistic inventory system so you will have to build things to help you transport materials.
Whenever I hear "realistic" regarding video games I cringe, because it usually means tedious. So that holds no interest for me.
I found space engineer's inventory system - small personal carrying capacity making transport vehicles a part of the gameplay instead of just convinence - pretty interesting, and am still kinda salty that it's an option instead of, you know, an aspect that the game is designed around.

ME looks like it'll be interesting, but in exactly the same way SE is.
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Taleric
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Taleric »

DaveYanakov wrote:Taleric, SE recently overhauled armor and completely changed the damage models as a result. It is now entirely possible to do large ship slugfests without silly technobabble energy shielding
Oh sweet I will have to take a look :) before it was just pointless how weak everything was!
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Gilberreke
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Gilberreke »

This might actually be something I enjoy. It ticks some trivial checkboxes for stuff I tend to like. Hopefully it'll be something playable. Not asking for a good game, just decent :)

Some weird part of me enjoys games that aren't very good anyway (Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green comes to mind), who knows?
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DerAlex
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by DerAlex »

They've got a new video up about structural integrity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpS5XGjb3jg

While it looks really nice as sort of a tech demo, I can't really imagine how this will ever work as a multiplayer thing with that level of complexity
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Gilberreke
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Gilberreke »

Why so negative? They've done everything they promised for Space Engineers in the past. Sure, there was a lack of game design, but development wise, Space Engineers got everything right imo.

They say they're going to add structural integrity, they do it in a matter of weeks, they let someone else try it out and do a video on it and it works. Servers will be heavy to run, sure, but so are Space Engineers servers.
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by LupusExMachina »

The level of complexity is actually far lower than it looks in the first place.
The structural integrity seems to rely solely on z-forces.
I can't see any tensile strengh simulation.
Also, the parts seem to have pre defined break points, you can see it in the section with the statues.

They seem to use a lot of tricks here, so it might actually be possible to go multiplayer with this.
Just as an assumption: Who would notice if some debris just magically vanish or have reduced physic calculations if there is a giant mass of them?
So, there is the option of just removing some as a building collapses and in addition, the pre defined breaking points allow for efficient hitboxes for every part.

And rewatching it, I just saw several occasions where the debris react extremely unrealisitic. Not sure how they do the calculations for that, but you have to watch pretty closely to see it. It shouldn't be visible during normal gameplay, but it looks like it saves up a lot of computing power.
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Gilberreke
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Gilberreke »

Yeah, I agree. The lack of tensile strength is pretty obvious. You can't make it too realistic of course, because then you'd need an engineering degree to actually build something :)

But yeah, seems like a pretty clever simplified system.
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DerAlex
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by DerAlex »

As far as I know, they didn't send the demo to some random youtuber. They send him the video to talk over, and this is on the official channel. Nobody else tried it. It might even be somewhat prerendered, even if it doesn't look like it.

In single player this is no problem, and I don't think running this kind of thing on a mid range gaming PC would be any kind of trouble. But physics and multiplayer don't mix too well. The problem is not the structural integrity itself, that can run on the server. The problem is the debris.

You've got 2 ways of dealing with this in Multiplayer, and both have serious drawbacks to the point of almost not being possible:

Ether the server runs the physics on the debris, which means every piece of debris has to be updated constantly from server to client and vice versa, which would mean massive communication between server and clients. I'm not saying this can't be done, but as far as I'm aware, I hasn't been done in gaming, and would be highly taxing for the server.

The second way of "solving" it would be to let the server calculate the structural integrity, which shouldn't be a problem, and let the debris be calculated clientside. That would then lead to 2 huge problems:

First, debris on Player PC 1 would always fall differently than debris on Player PC 2, and also differently on the server itself. Who get's authority? P1 stands on a pile of debris that fell totally different for P2, so he appears to be floating. Or the server has a huge piece of debris rendered somewhere where P1 or P2 sees nothing, so suddenly there is a invisible wall. You cannot rely on physics calculation, they are not deterministic.

The second and propably bigger problem is, hackers would run amok. If the user has authority, and if they have the technical skill, they can cheat by sending whatever physics information they want. Such as hurling all the debris back to the enemy player, defying any physics rules defined by the vanilla program. The server cannot detect these modifications without checking every piece of debris all the time, which would get us right back into the first way of dealing with this problem, and its huge network overhead with latency way past "playable".

I'm not saying I don't want it to work like they showed it in the video, and I think it's totally possible in a single player game. I just can't see it looking like that in multiplayer. There surely are ways to make it work, like debris always falling through the world, but as they showed, in multiplayer? No, I don't think so. It looks amazing, but doesn't work.
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FlowerChild
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by FlowerChild »

I'd really advise staying away from technical descriptions like the above unless you have first hand experience with designing and implementing such systems (which I do). There's a whole lot of bullshit embedded within the above, and worse, it's written in such a way that it might lead people to mistakingly believe you know what you're talking about, and will likely only be detected by someone that already knows how this stuff works making attempting to communicate the information contained largely useless anyways. In other words, its only purpose seems to be disinformation.

Take this for example:
DerAlex wrote:You cannot rely on physics calculation, they are not deterministic.
Of course they can be. Most in fact are unless you're intentionally building some form of random variance into them to spice things up or to avoid more computationally expensive calculations by replacing them with random results. What isn't necessarily certain and synced between clients is the initial data those calculations are applied to, and there are ways around that if you design your system appropriately, and that includes preventing cheating at the same time. In fact, I have designed the multiplayer component for entire games around defying the above statement so I know first hand that it's bullshit.

If you want to express *opinions* of this kind, feel free, as you are not wrong about all this being difficult to pull off (multiplayer in general is never particularly easy to accommodate which is why I so often complain about players pressuring devs into including it in existing games), but please do not phrase them as statements of fact about details of technical implementation unless you are absolutely certain you know what you're talking about. There's really no shame in not knowing something and I've probably only worked with a handful of game devs in my entire life that thoroughly understood the implementation details of multiplayer games, so there's definitely no shame in not knowing something this technical.
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DerAlex
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by DerAlex »

Lie-to-children

A lie-to-children is a simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople, first described by science writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The word "children" should not be taken literally, but as encompassing anyone in the process of learning about a given topic regardless of age. It is itself a simplification of certain concepts in the philosophy of science.

Because some topics can be extremely difficult to understand without experience, introducing a full level of complexity to a student or child all at once can be overwhelming. Hence elementary explanations are simplified in a way that makes the lesson more understandable, though technically wrong. A lie-to-children is meant to be eventually replaced with a more sophisticated explanation which is closer to the truth.

Such statements are not usually intended as deceptions, and may in fact be true as a first approximation or within certain contexts. For example, Newtonian mechanics is less accurate than the theory of relativity at high speeds and quantum mechanics on small scales, but it is still a valid approximation to those theories in many situations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

But, you are correct, I'm in over my head here (This is not sarcastic). If my above post contains misinformation, I'm sorry about that. I've not yet seen that level of complexity in a multiplayer game, and I'm sceptical, that they are the ones to pull it of. Physics engines and multiplayer don't mix that well. That part should be correct in any way.
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FlowerChild
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by FlowerChild »

Maybe, but we're obviously not all "children" here (and yes, I understand the use of the word there and am not objecting to it). Gil is an experienced programmer in his own right, and he was the guy you were responding to. I also find that when simplifying such things, explicitly mentioning that it's a simplification goes a long way in preventing the perpetuation of myths, and those kind of myths tend to run rather rampant through gaming communities.

I personally hate discussing technical details publicly on the net given how such conversations tend to get out of control, but I don't think I've ever felt the need to portray such things as anything other than they are, even if it comes down to "I don't want to get into that".
DerAlex wrote:But, you are correct, I'm in over my head here (This is not sarcastic). If my above post contains misinformation, I'm sorry about that. I've not yet seen that level of complexity in a multiplayer game, and I'm sceptical, that they are the ones to pull it of. Physics engines and multiplayer don't mix that well. That part should be correct in any way.
No shame in that man. And yes, it *is* extremely difficult and I have my doubts that Keen are the guys to be able to pull it off.

Heck, I made statements in the past about how I was strongly considering not having multiplayer in my own game due to not wanting to deal with stuff like that, and I've already done it before :)

Ultimately, I think that in order to pull off something really cool in multiplayer, you have to plan for it from the start, and it tends to go hand in hand with design concessions in order to make it possible. Are they doing that with Medieval Engineers? No idea, but I somehow doubt it.
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Gilberreke
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Gilberreke »

Yeah, I didn't say it'd be hard to do and taxing on servers. Space Engineers certainly is and this seems to involve even more calculations.

Your comment about physics is just wrong. Havok, the most used physics engine, for example, is completely deterministic.

One last minor comment: watch the dev interview. Keen has spent a lot of resources on this game. Part of that was inventing a fast algorithm to do these integrity calculations before they even started on the game proper, to assess if it's a viable product. These kinds of decisions is what makes me trust these guys to know what they're doing.

So yeah, I trust that they can make it, I'm just not sure if they can make it in a decent amount of time.
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DerAlex
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by DerAlex »

yeah, I did some reading in the mean time. I was under the impression that they are using unity, which they are NOT. AFAIK, what they want to do would not be possible with unity, but they developed their own engine for both "engineers" games, VRAGE 2.0, so my initial post is invalid. That changes things a bit, maybe they can surprise me... They seem to be, on a technical level at least, much more competent than I gave them credit for...

Still, I think they have to scale back a bit for the playable multiplayer version, but what the hell do I know. The last time I was somewhat intimate with physics engines was '07 or '08, so I'm not even close to being up to date. And even back then, I was IT-Guy, never programmer. I didn't want to step on anybodies toes, sorry

Edit: Because of this thread, I'm doing some reading up, and the general consensus seems to be: physics engines (consumer level) are not deterministic, at least not running on different hardware/software enviroments. It get's rather chaos theory-y and double pendulum-y after a while, but, as I understand it, floating point calculations lose accuracy or accumulate rounding errors over time because the precision is not infinite, and different hardware handles calculations in different ways. If there are many parts interacting with one another (like the debris in the above video), the results get unpredictable, fast. Now I don't know what to think :D

I have a degree in computer science, but I never worked directly in that field, nor did I ever program anything game-related or simulation-related specifically. This is quite a long time ago, too, so I might be filled with dangerous half truths/half knowledge because of bad memory. I genuinely want to learn
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Gilberreke
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Re: Medieval Engineers

Post by Gilberreke »

There's several ways around that man. From what I've seen, I think VRAGE uses locksteps, meaning the server sends all particles to clients and so the physics run server-side only. You can also run physics on both server and client and send sync packets, which makes it so there's less hickups client-side, but stuff might jump around a bit if the net connection isn't fast enough to keep up with physics. I personally haven't used it, but I think you can force most FPU's to adhere strictly to spec too.

There's all sorts of ways to handle the problem of deterministic floating point and it's one of the things that most game companies have extremely in-depth know-how about.

Basically, you're wandering into an area of expertise that has existed for years and years.
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