¶ Dev Spotlight on Baron!
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HQ Systems Engineer |
History with the Team
- HQ Systems for Sim Settlements 2, Chapter 2
Dev Q&A
¶ Where are you from?
- All around the US. I move pretty much yearly for my day job as a software developer.
¶ What other hobbies do you have?
- Lots of other video games and several board games, including tabletop RPGs like D&D.
¶ What other games do you play?
- Modded Minecraft, Destiny 2, League of Legends, Gloomhaven, Pathfinder ACG, really anything with depth, replayability, and good lore!
¶ What is your favorite thing to work on for SS2? and why?
- Definitely backend systems design. I helped script a lot of the HQ systems, which was an attempt at making a flexible, decentralized, and expandable system to allow for as much modding potential possible. I also helped a lot with building some new coding utility systems into WSFW that would later be leveraged into SS2, such as a task execution quest and a story event fetcher quest.
¶ What was the most difficult thing you worked on in
- Definitely the room/upgrade functionality of HQ. The backend system a lot of HQ uses is code named the "Action" system and was designed from the ground up to be a generic and highly efficient global trigger/checking system. The keyword there being global.
We went through dozens of different ideas on how to take upgrades (which started as global actions, once you do one, you can't re-do them) and to apply that same upgrade to multiple rooms. Then on top of that, how to apply the same upgrade to a completely different HQ!
¶ Do you have a story about working on SS2 that you'd like to share?
- I actually started working on the HQ backend system while Chapter 1 was still in development. This was even before the resource subsystem existed in SS2 base. One of the challenges I tried to fit into the HQ system was managing resources, like retrieving donations from settlements and putting them in physical stockpiles in HQ. I spent a few weeks building out a transactional framework to support any generic resource (given a few base scripts and CK forms) that would natively support most of the resources already in Fallout 4.
The idea was you would build a lot of actual storage space containers at your HQ location (crates, pantries, refrigerators, etc.) and my resource subsystem would figure out how much storage potential for each resource you have. The framework laid out all sorts of variables for these resource containers, such as automatic spoilage rates, growth rates, amount they can stockpile, and all these different variables would have led to a lot of different upgrade paths for each individual container.
Unfortunately there were a few difficult problems to solve and we needed something to ship for SS2 Chapter 1 so that ended up getting replaced by the resource/level system in SS2 you guys see now.
¶ What's next for you?
- Continuing to support the HQ scripting backend and hopefully building out some mods for HQ to get some fun functionality! I've always wanted to implement some sort of banking/loan type room in HQ for player stored caps.