Update imminent!

[Bare Mettle]

The next big update is due out in days, but before I just give you a bunch of release notes, I want to address the elephant in the room. We all know the update has taken an extraordinarily long time to get here, and I want to touch on that. What started out as just the next update became a turning point in development, and from there the work just piled on.

There is a lot that comes with this update. We've overhauled huge parts of the core game, added important new features, a lot of new and revisited content, improved on almost every aspect of the game, we've also expanded and improved our development tools, and paved the road for big features to come. Most of this will be in the release notes, but I wanted to touch on a big topic that I think needs some context, and represents the biggest effort development wise: our AI.


To understand why AI is important you need to understand our core design philosophy (many of you do, I know!). You might think the game's physics were designed for combat. They were not. They were designed to support an interactive and dynamic world, where things aren't just symbolic representations with specified outcomes, but actually functional. However important, combat is just one aspect of something broader.

This applies to everything we do. We don't create a world from preset interactions and scenarios, we create things with functional effects, which can produce certain outcomes, but also many more that we never even thought of. Things just work, this gives the player creative freedom, it makes the world more "tangible" and in a sense more real. We want the choice to do anything we can think of, and witness plausible outcomes. Whether this is desirable or important is not relevant, it is important to us, it furthers our immersion.


AI is such a vast topic that I've never figured out how to talk about it. Perhaps I will have to do a series of more in-depth discussions of specific aspects of it. We've been figuring this out for years, we built some core features of the game to support it, we've had simple approximations of some behaviour models in the game for some time. But there was still a lot to figure out, and a massive amount of work to make it functional.

We've now built a complete core behaviour model. This covers personalities, social behaviour and influences, interpreting the actions of others, relationships, memory, emotions and other states of mind, and many subtle but notable things besides. It is a functional core for some life-like emergent behaviour, and it also supports separate but important things like manipulation with mind thaumaturgy.

But this alone is not nearly enough. There is behaviour, and then there is intelligence, understanding endless possible situations and knowing what to do. The more scenarios you imagine, and the more player and mechanical freedom you allow, the more this seems insurmountable. We've designed an incremental approach to this problem, which we call the role system. It is in a sense a library of behaviours befitting various situations. Big topic, I will discuss it more later, but it is something we can build gradually, expanding on what our AI is capable of doing.

Realistically most of this won't come into play until the more complex setting of Sui Generis, but it is important that we are now using these systems to drive all AI, and even in Exanima's context, there is much we can do with it.


We have some ambitious goals, and we've built high expectations in the community over the years. Of course we had to start somewhere, and we inevitably entered a cycle of feedback and refinement which distracted us from other goals. We had to break this cycle, we had to stop building on top of incomplete systems to move forward.

It's easy enough to imagine simple solutions by simplifying the problem. But we're not interested in that. The game is full of open ended tasks, many things you could spend years on, but I am just one man programming everything, developing the game and our content tools, and doing much more besides. There is even more I ought to do, such as communicate better with you, but marketing material and hype is not my thing, and I also hate spoilers. I do think communication is important, perhaps even more so with this unique game. I do want to try to do better, I mean it, but things rarely go as planned, and I am often overwhelmed already.

Anyway, the update really is just about ready for release. And we have a tonne of stuff lined up for smaller updates in the near future, things that are very nearly complete, or that we will be fleshing out significantly.

[DictatorInPerpetuity]

I just wish you guys would be more open in steam discussions during this LOOOONG wait. The kickstarter crap needs to end also, we don't get any early access at all if they keep getting to test first, which is the job of early access.

[Bare Mettle]

Originally posted by ✪ Dictator In Perpetuity ✪:

The kickstarter crap needs to end also, we don't get any early access at all if they keep getting to test first, which is the job of early access.

Our tester backers are literally that, our testers. Our development team is 6 people, including our music composer. We can't do our own testing. Early access or not, I think many steam users would be unhappy with repeatedly losing saves and experiencing game breaking bugs to start all over again, and again. "Getting to test" really isn't much of a privilege.

[Nineball]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qouCwQsha3c

[Ꝡꜧꭵtꬲ Ꝡꭴꝇꝭ]

Originally posted by Bare Mettle:

Things just work

Nooo, not the dreaded Todd Howard line(apparently it just starts at 0:00 so just skip to 5:25) https://youtu.be/A8P2CZg3sJQ?t=5m25s

Joking aside, I can't wait to overplay the new content and possibly create massive loot piles if that's still a possibility. Either way my OCD will take over again, I'm sure.

[Zetheros]

\o/

[DictatorInPerpetuity]

Originally posted by Bare Mettle:

Originally posted by ✪ Dictator In Perpetuity ✪:

The kickstarter crap needs to end also, we don't get any early access at all if they keep getting to test first, which is the job of early access.

Our tester backers are literally that, our testers. Our development team is 6 people, including our music composer. We can't do our own testing. Early access or not, I think many steam users would be unhappy with repeatedly losing saves and experiencing game breaking bugs to start all over again, and again. "Getting to test" really isn't much of a privilege.

This isn't a finished game, testing is apart of the process. Most early access games have branches or expermimental builds with seprate save files that allows early access people to help with the feedback for the game. Getting to test is exactly a privilege, a privilege you are supposed to get when you buy the game. You just slapped early access on early access. You guys are gonna do what you want anyways so whatever. It wouldn't be so bad if we had more discussions about what is going on in the game on these forums. Tony is the only one active really and all he does is give a sales pitch and make sure the VERY devided community doesn't eat each other alive.

[ratpizza]

I'm really excited about the update and in particular the new dialogue and AI-mechanics. I'm probably going to get my ass handed to me by the new combat-AI but it will be so worth it if the AI is half as good as it appears:)
Oh, and I think your communication is just fine. I prefer one proper news-report over a constant stream of meaningless "we are alive"-updates.

[Tony]

I've attempted to keep people informed with what BM are working on and what future patches will include, answer questions, help people troubleshoot, etc. With that being said, I also plan on doing regular progress reports in a pinned thread that talk about what the entire BM team have been working on :).

[DictatorInPerpetuity]

Originally posted by Tony:

I've attempted to keep people informed with what BM are working on and what future patches will include, answer questions, help people troubleshoot, etc. With that being said I also plan on doing regular progress reports in a pinned thread that talk about what the entire BM have been working on which should help keep people more informed :).

I look forward to the posts.

[Bananaborn]

so now AI in arena will try to kill me if I do not do anything? because now they in most cases counterattack and generally do not know how to attack a player when he does nothing... (and yes, I'd rather have lost all my saves a thousand and one times than to wait a year and a half, you have fans who you just put on the shelf and covered with a cardboard box so you would not hear their screams but all we wanted was to play your game because we liked it so much that instead of just forgetting about the game, we come here every day to write "update" or "dead game" or "kickstarter is cancer" and how would it be good if you just did the open test, but at least you did not abandon the game)

[Arthur]

Originally posted by Bananaborn:

"kickstarter is cancer"

This "cancer" as you call it made the game possible in the first place, you literally would not have a place to post how you feel about the development cycle in if not the people who supported BM in their early upstanding days.

Currently Bare Mettle have enough early testers, and you still take part in testing even in the public build, it just comes as second big wave of troubleshooting. Suggestions, constructive critisism, bug reports - are all always welcome.

[Iku-Turso]

Yeboiii. Hail madoc!

[DictatorInPerpetuity]

Originally posted by Arthur:

Originally posted by Bananaborn:

"kickstarter is cancer"

This "cancer" as you call it made the game possible in the first place, you literally would not have a place to post how you feel about the development cycle in if not the people who supported BM in their early upstanding days.

Currently Bare Mettle have enough early testers, and you still take part in testing even in the public build, it just comes as second big wave of troubleshooting. Suggestions, constructive critisism, bug reports - are all always welcome.

And everyone on steam helped further their development. They supported it almost 6 years ago, we are here now. How about we just all have the same access okay?

[Zetheros]

It's not going to happen Dictator; this has been discussed before.

Bare Mettle would be backing out of an agreement with possible legal repercussions, as well as losing trust with the people who've stuck around since the beginning.

[DictatorInPerpetuity]

Originally posted by Zetheros:

It's not going to happen Dictator; this has been discussed before.

Bare Mettle would be backing out of an agreement with possible legal repercussions, as well as losing trust with the people who've stuck around since the beginning.

They backed Sui Generis not Exanima.