This month has been unusually productive, possibly because a number of our team members have started summer vacation. But, before we get to that:
- BrickPi: BrickPi is another developer who is also part of the OpenVic2 project. For us, BrickPi has contributed an upgrade that allows new windows developers to rely on the installation path of their copy of Victoria 2 for development rather than having to manually spell it out to get started.
- Breizh: While new to the team, Breizh has been part of our discord since the very first days. And, despite being new, has contributed a ton of work this month towards completing the UI.
- Ivysaur: Ivysaur is also someone who has been with us on discord since the beginning. Ivysaur joined at the very end of the month, and currently hasn't had time to contribute more than a few tool tips.
This month we asked Erik, one of the four founding members of Project Alice and a major contributor to SOE: "How has working on Project Alice been different from working on SOE?"
Working on Alice has been significantly smoother, thanks both to having clearer goals and the experience gained from working on SoE. It has been incredibly helpful having worked on a map game before. Progress on Project Alice has also been much faster, which is largely thanks to the excellent work done by all contributors. Another factor is that feature creep is mostly non-existent here.
There has been a greater interest in this project, which is to be expected given the large demand for an open source Victoria 2 (just look at the number of forks of Open V2). I'm looking forward to the huge modding potential once 1.0 is completed. Modding in Vic2 is rather limited, and that's something I would like to see improved.
As hinted at last month, work on the globe has progressed. To make the standard Victoria 2 map work on the globe we have added some blank space to the poles. It isn't a perfect solution, but it does a pretty good job. We are also working on a full map of the globe with a proper projection based on the Open V2 map, and hopefully we will be able to release version 1.0 with that as an additional option for unmodded games. (The traditional flat map also remains available via a menu option, but I have felt no temptation to go back to it.)
But what we have been mostly focusing on this month is implementing user actions and the ui required to support them. One immediately noticeable addition are events.
In this event illustrates a number of interesting things. The blue text will eventually be turned into hyperlinks that, when clicked, will take you to the named province, state, or nation. You can also see the arrows--still a bit of a work in progress--that will help organize things for you when multiple events are occurring at once. The tool tip also shows that the effects specified in the files are being processed correctly, and your event choices do work as expected when you make them (barring any bugs).
Constructions of all sorts, including factories, military units, and provincial buildings like forts have also made their way in. Above you can see a cloth factory mid construction.
Above is the--only partially completed--window for building factories. I included this simply because it shows how the unnecessary description of what paper is used for, originally featured in Victoria 1, still survives. It always makes me laugh.
This small snippet shows a new tech in the middle of being researched, as well as the newly-implemented line graphs (courtesy of forn).
Releasing nations (and optionally switching to play as them) has also been added. Above you can see both the release nation dialog box (with obviously some work still needing to be done with the text color) and the result of releasing Ireland.
Here we can see that it is possible to gain influence and increase your relations with someone. Most of the influence actions and simple diplomatic actions have been implemented. However, without a real AI, our placeholder functionality defaults to accepting all military access requests and rejecting all alliance requests.
There is not enough space to screen shot all of the other actions that have been added, but here is the list: change national focus, start research, build province buildings, increase relations, decrease relations, build factories, build ships, build regiments, cancel unit construction, change factory priority, delete factories, release nation, play as nation, give/cancel war subsidies, change budget settings, start an election, change influence priority, discredit advisors, expel advisors, ban embassy, increase opinion, decrease opinion, add to sphere, remove from sphere, turn a colony into a state, invest in a colonial race, intervene in war, suppress a movement, westernize, appoint ruling party, adopt/repeal a reform, join a crisis, change stockpile settings, take a decision, make an event choice, fabricate a casus belli, ask for military access, ask for an alliance. Yeah, it is a lot of stuff.
A first draft of almost everything required for the game's daily update, outside of the military, has been added. That includes things ranging from pop migration, to elections, to rebel movements, to events, to constructing units and buildings. Of course, this early in development, there are probably still plenty of bugs hiding inside, but it is satisfying to see most of the world behaving roughly like it should.
Project Alice has attracted some interest among the Chinese-speaking Victora 2 community. Due to the language barrier and other logistical issues, most of this community is not present on our discord. To help bridge the gap, we will be working with some members of that community to try to provide translations into Chinese of our monthly updates and other key pieces of the documentation. If you are in contact with other non-English-speaking communities that are interested in the project and are willing to do the translation work required, we would be happy to support other languages as well.
The upcoming month will be focused primarily on implementing things associated with the military and warfare, both in the ui and in the game internals. This means things such as moving units, resolving battles, declaring wars, and sending peace offers. My hope is to get to a kind of punching-bag version by the end of the next month, which is a game where everything basically works but where the AI is totally passive.
While there is a fair amount of work that needs to go into the military side of things, none of it is particularly technically challenging. The same cannot be said about implementing the AI. I currently plan on treating AI decision making as essentially independent processes tied together by a shallow understanding of its overall situation, at most. A world-class AI would take everything into consideration when making decisions, but I think that we can still get something acceptable by splitting up its decision making. And, importantly for getting things done on time, splitting up the AI in this way makes it easy to divide the work between different team members, since the person working on how the AI chooses to build factories doesn't then have to worry about how the AI chooses to make alliances.
If you are interested in working on the AI and know some C++, this would be a good time to join the team (please join the team), as you could use the time we are working on the military and warfare to become familiar with the project before we move on to the AI.
See you again next month! (or, if you can't wait that long, join us on discord)