diff --git a/doc/Simulated-genetics.md b/doc/Simulated-genetics.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5bd0ab0 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/Simulated-genetics.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +# Simulated Genetics + +If we're going to have a world with a multi-generational population of hundreds of thousands of procedurally generated characters, and we're to persuasively represent each character as being related to others, then we have to have a mechanism for making children look reasonably like their parents, to have family resemblances among cousins, and so on. We need to do this at reasonably low data storage and algorithmic cost, firstly because we have to store all these characters, and secondly because (especially when the player approaches an urban centre), we may need to instantiate models for a lot of them in limited time. + +This note discusses how this might be done. + +## The pseudo-genome + +Suppose we have a binary vector of memory, such that when a 'child' was born to two parents, bits were taken at random from the parents' chromosomes to populate the child's genome -- which is sort of, very roughly, what happens in actual biology -- how big would that genome have to be? After all, the full data size of the human genetic code is enormous. But actually, we don't need to simulate anything like so large. After all, all our genome needs to encode is morphology, and only sufficiently to enable the player to recognise and distinguish characters. + +My hunch is that a 32 bit genome is sufficient, if we code it carefully. It allows for four billion distinct appearances to be encoded, which is way more than we need. So here's how such a genome might be structured: + +| Field | Bits | Interpretation | +| -------------------- | ---- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | +| Ethnic type | 4 | Ethnic type. Most significant bits both indicate dark skin, with [??11] indicating dark skin/curly hair and [??01] indicating dark skin/straight hair | +| Skin tone | 3 | Plus second-most significant bit from ethnic type (i.e. [??1?]) as most significant bit. This means sixteen distinct tones, with the darkest tone of 'pale skinned' ethnicities just very slightly lighter than the palest tone of 'dark skinned' ethnicities. | +| Freckles? | 2 | [11] means freckles, any other value means no freckles. Freckles won't be visible on very dark skin. | +| Hair colour | 3 | Plus second-most significant bit from ethnic type (i.e. [??1?]) as most significant bit. Least significant bit does not contribute to tone but indicates red tint. Thus eight distinct degrees of darkness from pale blond to black, plus red tint which can affect any degree of darkness. | +| Eye colour | 2 | Plus second-most significant bit from ethnic type (i.e. [??1?]) as most significant bit. Thus eight values: [000] blue; [001] hazel; [010]...[111] shades of brown lighter->darker. | +| Height | 3 | Height when adult; children will have a scaled proportion of their adult height, and the same height value in the genome will result in female body models 95% the height of an equivalent male body model. So [000] codes for 150mm, [111] codes for 200mm, with eight distinct values | +| Gracility/Robustness | 3 | Slenderness to stockiness of skeleton/armature build, with [000] being very slender and [111] being very broad/heavy. | +| Age-related change | 3 | People get white haired at different ages; some men go bald and some do not. The sons of the daughter of a bald man should have a chance of inheriting age-related baldness, although their mother won't express that gene. So I'm allowing here for eight different profiles for age related change, although I'm not yet clear what the exact values would mean. | + +That's twenty-two of our thirty-two bits, leaving 10 bits (1024 values) for face models; but actually, that 2048 distinct possible face models, because the morphology of female faces is different from the morphology of male faces. Although, again, we might encode gender into the genome, which would mean only bits left for face models, but still, 1024 distinct faces is plenty, especially as each face model would need to have its own aging model, so that characters would credibly age. + +## What's not included in the genome + +Things which are cultural are not included in the genome; things which are lifestyle related are not included in the genome. So, for example, gracility/robustness, is not the same as skinniness/fatness, which are mostly lifestyle/diet related rather than genetic. There are some occupations (e.g., blacksmith) where you'd be unlikely to be fat (but might be very robust). Also, the same character might grow fatter (or thinner) over time. + +Similarly, hairstyle and beard-wearing are cultural (and occupational) rather than genetic, and closely related to choice of clothing. So while we do need to represent these things, they're not things which should be represented in the genome. + +Injury-related change -- which would especially affect soldiers and outlaws especially but could affect any character -- also needs to be encoded somehow (and may cause real problems), but this is also not a problem for the genome. + diff --git a/doc/Worlds-and-flats.md b/doc/Worlds-and-flats.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70b7cf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/Worlds-and-flats.md @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +# Worlds and flats [obsolete] + +*This essay is from 2008, and is now at least partly obsolete; but there's useful stuff in it which is worth holding onto.* + +## Of Compartmented Worlds + +Playing The Witcher has got me thinking again about an algorithm for rendering a world which I first thought of twenty-five years ago. Then, it was a hack for dealing with the fact that the computers of the day didn't have much memory or horsepower. Now, it's a hack for dealing with the fact that — when considered against the complexity of a world — the computers of today still don't have enough memory and horsepower. Mind you, today I'm contemplating photorealistic scenes, whereas then simple line and wash would have been good enough, but... + +The algorithm for rendering I'll call 'flats'. But before we get to discussing flats, lets discuss worlds. +The world of The Witcher (and other games based on the Aurora engine) is composed of areas. One area is loaded into memory at a time; when the player reaches an area boundary, the area is unloaded in toto, and the next area loaded, also in toto. The result is a noticeable interruption in game play. There's also, normally, a noticeable visual disjunction at the boundary; the new area uses a different 'tileset', which is to say, set of bits of scenery. When you look across a boundary, the scenery often appears different from what you find when you cross the boundary and arrive at the other side. + +Finally, you can only cross boundaries at specific gateway points. For example, Chapter Four of The Witcher takes place in a continuous rural space composed of three main areas: the lakeside, the village, and the fields. Between the lakeside and the other two regions there's a wooded escarpment, which provides some logical justification for the fact that there are actually only two places you can actually cross it — from the lake shore, either up the road to the village or else through a series of glades to the fields. But between the village and the fields there's no such logic. There are a pair of gateposts, and you must cross between those gateposts — but the landscape appears continuous, with no visible barrier. It's an artifact of the game engine. + +So, how to deal with this? + +My interest, let's be frank, is in story telling; and the nature of story telling is moderately constrained plots. In computer mediated story telling the reader/player can and should be able to explore the plot in his own way, make his own choices, take his own path through the environment, encounter the elements of the plot as he encounters them on that path, and it's the job of the story teller to make that engaging whatever path the reader takes. But if the reader chooses to ignore your hints and wander out of the area you've populated with plot altogether, there's two things you can do. One is put up physical barriers which stop him (although the silly field fences in Chapter One of The Witcher do *not* count, as it's obvious that Geralt could simply hurdle them; they are just another artifact). + +## Of Finite and Infinite Worlds + +But an infinite world is not required for the sort of stories I'm interested in; the sort of stories I'm interested in take place in, at best, regions of infinite worlds. Just because I don't choose to use all of it, of course, is not a reason that a world should not be very large. + +There are plenty of fractal mathematical equations which map an infinite three dimensional surface with landscape like features. If such an equation gives you land heights, then altitude, steepness and orientation will give you soil type and vegetation cover. There is no need to store a whole world in order to be able to reproduce it exactly when the player follows the same route through it for a second time; it is sufficient to start with the same seed. So a world need not take up vast amounts of disk space for pre-mapped scenery; scenery need only be mapped as it comes in sight. This is fundamentally the trick used by Elite to pack a large, reproducible universe into less than 32K of RAM, and it still works today. + +### Of River Systems + +However, there are reasons to prefer that a world be pre-mapped, at least at coarse grain. One example of why is river systems. It's trivial that we render a river at the bottom of a valley, but it isn't trivial to compute how wide and deep that river should be. To calculate that we have to explore the extent of the watershed upstream of any given point, and sum the rainfall on it, which in turn is a factor of exposure to prevailing airflow and the proximity of ocean to windward. It's computable, but it's much more efficient to compute it once and cache the results, especially since for any given river system it's a recursive function. + +Furthermore, rivers cause erosion, changing the landscape through which they pass, cutting gorges on steep slopes (especially if soft), building up flood-plains in flatter areas downstream. Some fractals are naturally extremely landscape-like, but it seems to me — better mathematicians might prove me wrong — to realistically render river systems requires some degree of post processing, and post processing which would be expensive to do repeatedly in realtime. + +### Of Human Settlement + +Human settlement is a separate issue. Many years ago I wrote a program which modelled the spread of human settlement over a landscape. + +Human settlement is not random. Human settlement follows rules and patterns. Pioneers settle in places which have a sufficient spread of resources to meet their year round needs; they settle near to easy routes from their parent settlement. Pastoralists need grazing land and water; they spread up river systems, but avoid marshy areas. They settle where there is open grazing, but often close to a forest edge for access to timber. Second wave settlers prefer to settle close to existing settlers, for mutual protection and help. Cereal growers join these settlements where the depth of soil is optimal for crops. As the settlement grows and pressure on land increases, the forest edge is cut back both for building material and to increase the available agricultural land. If a settlement fails, the forest may reclaim this land + +Road networks develop. People travel between settlements by the easiest route — but the very fact a route is travelled makes it easier. A path gets cleared; later, people fill in boggy bits and bridge streams, to make their own passage easier or to encourage trade through their lands. Because as a road grows more important, so the settlements along it grow more important, and as the settlements along it grow more important so the roads between them grow more important. The road network, then, is a dynamic fractal which interacts with another dynamic fractal, the distribution of human settlement. + +The program I wrote was a cellular automaton which modelled human settlement in only thirty states. It did a remarkably good job. Settlement would spread across a landscape; settlements in strategically beneficial areas would grow faster, develop temples and markets sooner, and thus become important foci of the roads system; other settlements would wax and wane, some falling into ruin; new waves of settlers might settle in slightly different areas. + +More states would be better, give a richer, more subtle model, But this demonstrates that it's easy to design a program which will settle a landscape in a realistic way automatically. Once again, though I think it can be done more realistically if it is precomputed and cached rather than if it is generated from the landscape fractal. + +In summary: yes, I think it's possible to have a near-infinite world which is satisfying and can be reproduced at will from a seed, but the stories I want to tell do not call for infinite worlds and if the world is finite I believe it can be made still more satisfyingly realistic by pre-computing and caching things like river systems, afforestation and settlement patterns. Either way, though, the world can be very large — much larger than the worlds of current near-photo-realistic games. The world of The Witcher, for example, is a few hundred hectares; I'm envisaging storing hundreds or thousands of square kilometres in similar data size and with a similar expenditure of artist's effort. + +## Rendering, and the Flats idea + + Rendering a convincing distant view in computer-generated virtual environment is hard. There's an enormous amount of data in a distant view, and if the viewer is moving in real time it becomes computationally unaffordable, even on machines with a great deal of horsepower. Games typically work around this problem by either angling the camera downwards, or else rendering a high degree of atmospheric haze — it's always slightly foggy — so there is never a distant horizon. + + Movies shot in studios often have wonderful, detailed backgrounds to their sets. Vistas of far mountains and great cities... of course, the far mountains and great cities don't exist in the set. They're painted on large canvases called 'flats'. The flats illusion depends on the camera not moving too much, because of parallax — nearer things should appear to move relative to further things, and on a flat they don't. + + But. But. + + For a player moving in a computer game the field of view is quite restricted — it's no more than thirty degrees, typically straight ahead as he moves. Parallax movements are less significant straight ahead. A single flat still isn't going to work, but in many animated films a system of multiple flats is used, with the nearer flat moved relative to the further flat to give an illusion of parallax. This can work very well. + Suppose one projects onto the world a hexagonal grid — it doesn't have to be hexagonal, but I think that is likely to work best — with a cell size of about 100 metres (the exact cell size depends a bit on the speed of movement of the player, for reasons which will become apparent). Cells are grouped into metacells of seven cells (if square, then metacells of nine cells). For each cell, there are six inner flats. Each inner flat consists of a rendering from the centre of the cell of everything more than one cell distant, but less than five cells distant, over a 60 degree arc of view. + + For a given area of the world the distant view doesn't change very much. We don't, therefore, have to compute a set of outer flats for every cell, just for every metacell. The outer flats each consist of a rendering of the scenery more than one whole metacell away, from the centre of the metacell. + To render a scene, then, we first paint the outer flat for the metacell the player is in, in the direction the player is looking. Over that we paint the inner flat for the cell the player is in. Over that we render the actual objects in the adjacent cells which fall within the viewing area. Over that we render the objects in the current cell. Thus we only have to render in real time certainly no more objects than can already be rendered by systems which clip for distance either by angling the camera down or by using fog, and yet still manage a realistic distant view. + +## Rendering the Flats + + OK, so when do the flats get rendered? After all, if you're going to pre-render six full colour full screen resolution flats for every hundred metre cell in the world, then either your data volume is going to get enormous or your world is going to get pretty constrained — which was just what we were trying to get away from. And if you're going to multiply that with flats rendered for every time of day and every weather condition — well, it's not feasible. + + You cannot realistically pre-render the flats, in my opinion. Or if you can, you're going to have to give them so much real time post processing that you will lose the benefit. Pre-rendering the flats is not the idea. But if they are rendered in real time, where is the benefit...? + + There's a middle way. Running straight forward at top speed a player crosses a hundred metre cell in about a minute, during which to give an illusion of continuous movement at least nine hundred full screen frames must have rendered. But the flats don't change in a minute. The flats don't change in five minutes. They don't need to. Even if rain clouds are sweeping across the landscape, it's OK for the distant view still to be sunny five minutes after the rain reaches you, or vice versa. If you can render a high proportion of the detail in a view only once every nine hundred frames, you've saved a lot of processing. + + So there is a continuous background process running which renders flats. It does it all the time. It prioritises making sure that a flat exists for every direction the player may look in in the next minute — that is, every direction from the cells and metacells he's currently heading towards. Having done that, it renders flats for cells to either side which he might turn to. It maintains in memory a small stock of flats from recently visited cells, so that if the player turns back they don't have to be repainted in a hurry; and if a flat is more than about five minutes — 4,500 frames — old, it may repaint it to update time-of-day lighting or weather effects. + + Obviously, quite a lot of the time the join between two adjacent flats will be in view. I don't see this as a problem. Just naturally, the rendering of the flats should essentially form segments of a hoop, so the join between two adjacent flats should not be perceptible. + +## Artifacts + + Inevitably, there will be undesired artifacts of this system. Significantly, mobile objects — 'non-player characters', the avatars of other players, monsters and computer mediated creatures in the landscape — more than two cells away will not be visible. The flat is static, so it can't have moving characters on it. There may be some algorithmic way round this, since one hundred and fifty metres away is rather close for people to suddenly vanish; but it is not a problem I have a solution for. + + Again, if the player is looking sideways as they cross a metacell boundary, there will be a jarring sudden shift in parallax. I acknowledge that and think it just can't be helped; that the benefits in terms of quality of view for given computer power, will render it acceptable. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/Building_on_microworld.html b/docs/codox/Building_on_microworld.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f886ee --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/codox/Building_on_microworld.html @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ + +Building on Microworld

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Building on Microworld

+

In Settling a Game World I intended that a world should be populated by setting agents - settlers - to explore the map and select places to settle according to particular rules. In the meantime, I’ve built MicroWorld, a rule driven cellular automaton which makes a reasonably good job of modelling human settlement. It works, and I now plan to use it, as detailed in this note; but there are issues.

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First and foremost, it’s slow, and both processor and memory hungry. That means that at continent scale, a cell of one kilometre square is the minimum size which is really possible, which isn’t small enough to create a settlement map of the density that a game will need. Even with 1 km cells, even on the most powerful machines I have access to, a continent-size map will take many days to run.

+

Of course it would be possible to do a run at one km scale top identify areas which would support settlement, and then to do a run on a ten metre grid on each of those areas to more precisely plot settlement. That’s an idea which I haven’t yet explored, which might prove fruitful.

+

Secondly, being a cellular automaton, MicroWorld works on a grid. This means that everything is grid aligned, which is absolutely not what I want! So I think the way to leverage this is to use MicroWorld to establish which kilometre square cells om the grid should be populated (and roughly with what), and then switch to ad hoc code to populate those cells.

+
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Game world economy

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Broadly this essay extends ideas presented in Populating a game world, q.v.

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Primary producers

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Herdsfolk

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Herdsfolk are nomadic; it’s reasonable to think they’ll bring their herds to market, rather than selling at lots of tiny markets. So in the spring, shepherds will visit specific towns at the edge of open land, to hold a shearing festival/carnevale; and that both shepherds and cattle herders will visit towns on the edge of open land to sell fatstock in the autumn.

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Miners

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Miners mine. They’re settled, but they’re settled usually in specialist settlements at the location where the ore body is accessible, usually in mountenous territory. They’ll consume a lot of food, so there will be a local market for foodstuffs encouraging local farming. Different mines obviously mine different ores, but, for example, lead and silver are frequently found together.

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Foresters

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Foresters are more or less settled at the edge of forests, at locations from which timber can be moved by navigable water; again in specialist settlements. In addition to timber, foresters hunt and produce both meat and furs, so have less need for other food producers locally.

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Farmers

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Farmers are settled. Farmers occupy standard runrig plots, but because they don’t employ journeymen or apprentices, and don’t have workshops, the plots are mostly open with little building. Most farmers are ‘mixed farmers’, producing cereals, meat, eggs and milk. Some will be more specialist. Farm produce, taken broadly to include orchardsfolk, include:

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  • meat
    • +
  • milk and milk products
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  • hides
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  • eggs
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  • cereals
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  • root vegetables, onions, etc
    • +
  • peas and beans
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  • leaf vegetables
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  • fruits
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  • fibres: linen, hemp and silk (from silk-moths in mulberry orchards)
    • +
  • possibly other stuff I’ve forgotten.
    • +
+

Farmers are all primarily subsistence farmers, farming first to feed their own household and selling only surplus in the market.

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Crafts

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Crafts generally process primary goods into secondary goods — whether intermediate stages or final consumer items. Some elite ‘crafts’ deal with abstract primary goods like law and knowledge, and they may be seen as somewhat separate.

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A master craftsperson may occupy a standard runrig plot, much like a farmer’s plot. Like a farmer, a poor master crafter household will cultivate part of the plot to produce food for the house — at least grow vegetables and keep hens. However, as the crafter takes on apprentices and journeymen — and gets richer — more buildings will be required as accommodation, workshop space and materials stores.

+

Also, Tchahua is much more a gold-rush town than an organic, grew over hundreds of years sort of town, so it is not ex-runrig; and additionally the original settlement was probably along the river bank, land which has now been redeveloped as warehouses and as rich merchant residences. Generally, town house plots are small from the get go.

+

Hans’hua is again an exception from normal organic development, as it has no agricultural land close to the city at all.

+

Generally, primary goods aren’t transported over land — because overland transport is expensive, by the time they’ve been transported they’re no longer low cost goods. So often the craftspeople who process primary produce into at least commodity intermediate forms will live close to the source of the primary goods.

+

So, for example, the town(s) where the shepherds hold their shearing fairs will tend to have a lot of weavers. While around mines there will be smelters producing ingots and bar stock to be marketed to smiths all over the place, there will also be smiths close to the mines producing commodity tools and weapons.

+

See the tables in Populating a game world.

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Naming of Characters

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Generally speaking, in modern RPGs, every character with any impact on the plot has a distinct name. But if we are going to give all non-player characters sufficient agency to impact on the plot, then we must have a way of naming tens or hundreds of thousands of characters, and distinct names will become problematic (even if we’re procedurally generating names, which we shall have to do. So this note is about how characters are named.

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The full name of each character will be made up as follows:

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epithet clan personal-name the trade-or-rank of location, son/daughter of parent

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Based on, roughly, historical name patterns like

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Archibald (personal-name) the Grim (epithet), Earl (trade-or-rank) of Douglas (location)

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Where

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  1. +

    epithet is a prefix based on some notable feature or feat of the character. Most characters won’t have an epithet, unless they have some notable feature or they’ve done something notable. If a character does something notable in the course of the game, they will subsequently gain an epithet; ‘notability’ may be measured by how many times the event is transmitted through the gossip network.

    +
    2. +
  2. +

    clan is special to the Western Clans, although people from the Great Place may possible use the name of their house similarly.

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    3. +
  3. +

    personal-name is chosen from one of a limited set of limited sets; different cultural groups will have different (possibly overlapping) sets of names, but within each set there will only be a limited subset

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    4. +
  4. +

    trade-or-rank is just that. “Smith”, “Miller”, “Ariston”, “Captain”. Either only master craftsfolk have the trade-or-rank name of their craft, or we distinguish between ‘Calon the Smith’, who may be a journeyman, and ‘Calon the Master Smith’, who is a master.

    +
    5. +
  5. +

    location is the name of a location; a village, town, city or province. The location which forms part of a character’s name is the location where there current home is, not the location where they were born or where their ancestors came from

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    6. +
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Full names will almost never be used - only, perhaps, in extremely formal circumstances. The form of a name used will depend on context, and will generally be just sufficient to disambiguate the character in the context.

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If the speaker is in Sinhua and referring to someone from Sinhua, they won’t refer to them as ‘of Sinhua’.

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If everyone present is a bargee and the speaker referring to someone who is also a bargee, they won’t refer to them as ‘the bargee’.

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The question asked influences the context: in answer to the question ‘who is the best sword smith’, the answer will not be ‘Calon the Smith’ but ‘Calon of Sinhua’.

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Patronymics/matronymics will not normally be used of adults (although they may be used of apprentices and journeymen.

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On Dying, and Injury

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Death is the end of your story. One of the tropes in games which, for me, most breaks immersion is when you lose a fight and are presented with a screen that says ‘you are dead. Do you want to reload your last save?’ Life is not like that. We do not have save-states. We die.

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So how could this be better handled?

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You lose a fight. Switch to cutscene: the battlefield, after the fight, your body is there. Probably no sound. A party of non-enemies crosses the battlefield and finds your body. We see surprise and concern. They gather around you. Cut to interior scene, you are in a bed, unconcious, being tended; cut to similar interior scene, you are in a bed, conscious, being tended; cut to exterior scene, you are sitting with some of your saviours, and the game restarts.

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Time has passed; events in the game world have moved on. You can talk to your saviours about it. You have lost a lot of strength, and most of the gear you were carrying. You must do whatever it is you do within the game mechanics to rebuild strength, and to acquire more gear. Significantly you have acquired a debt of honour to your saviours, which they may call on later. You almost certainly have new scars, and might possibly have some lasting effects (although how that interacts with other game mechanics might be tricky).

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So who are the non-enemies? It depends on context. If you have a party, and some of that party survived the fight, it’s your party. Otherwise, if you’re in a populated place, it’s locals. If it’s on a road or other route, it’s passing merchants. If you’re in the wilderness, a hunting party. It’s a bunch of non-hostiles who might reasonably be expected to be around: that’s what matters. It’s about not breaking immersion.

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Obviously losing a fight must have weight, it must have meaning, it must have in-game consequences; otherwise it is meaningless.

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Injury

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Similarly to death, injury must have meaning. Any injury takes time to recover from. It takes a certain amount of time if you’re able to rest somewhere safe, and considerably longer if you’re not. If you fight while injured, you’ll have less strength, less stramina, and probably also less agility. Depending where you’re injured, there will be certain things you cannot do. If you fight while injured, also, your recovery time will be extended, even if you take no further injury.

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Some serious injuries will lead to permanent scarring, and permanent loss of agility; you’ll be just slightly slower in fights.

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It should be said that Kenshi — a game I’ve only recently become aware of and greatly admire — handles all of this extremely well, and is worth studying.

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Reciprocity

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If the player is going to depend on good samaritans for rescue after losing a fight, then there must be at least a social convention that people should assist people found injured on the wayside. Consequently, if the player fails to do this, that should in itself become a ‘gossip’ event which will lower the player’s reputation with non-player characters.

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On the other hand, helping NPCs found injured at the wayside can be another category of organic quest, as a special subcategory of an escort quest.

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Sandbox

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Up to now I’ve been thinking of the Great Game as essentially an RPG with some sandbox-like elements; but I think it may be better to think of it as a sandbox game with some RPG like elements.

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Why?

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The core of the game is a world in which non-player characters have enough individual knowledge of the world and their immediate surroundings that they can sensibly answer questions like

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  • Where is the nearest craftsman of this craft?
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  • What price can I expect to get for this item in the local market?
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  • What news have you heard recently?
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  • Where does this person from your village live?
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and where there’s a sufficiently sophisticated and robust economy simulation that buying goods in one market and selling them in another is viable.

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The original BBC Micro space trading game Elite had very little more in terms of game mechanics than a sandbox with a means to navigate it and an economy simulation, which wasn’t even nearly as sophisticated as the one I have working now. Yet that combination resulted in engaging game play.

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Main sandbox roles

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The idea of a sandbox is that the player character should be able to do pretty much anything they like within the mechanics of the game. From that, it seems to me reasonable that the player ought to be able to do more or less everything a non-player character can do. But creating the game mechanics to make each additional task doable takes time and investment, so there’s a need to prioritise.

+

So, as Elite did, I propose to make the first available sandbox roles

+

Merchant

+

Someone who travels from city to city, buying goods cheap in one and selling them for more in another; and

+

Outlaw

+

Someone who intercepts and steals from merchants (and may also attack outlying farms and villages)

+

Second tier playable roles

+

The next tier of playable roles rotates around issues arising from the mercantile ecosystem.

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Aristocracy

+

Aristocrats are basically settled outlaws who seek to establish a monopoly on extracting taxes from inhabitants and travellers in a particular region by driving out all other outlaws. Within the domain of an aristocrat, you have to pay tax but you’re reasonably safe from being attacked by other outlaws and losing everything. Aristocrats may also maintain and improve roads and bridges and do other things to boost the economy of their territory, may expand into adjoining territory with no current aristocratic control, and may wage war on other aristocrats.

+

An outlaw ought to be able to become an aristocrat, by dominating an ungoverned area or by defeating an existing aristocrat.

+

Soldiery

+

Soldiers, like aristocrats, are basically on the same spectrum as outlaws. Outlaws may hire themselves out to merchants as caravan guards, or to aristocrats as soldiers. Soldiers or guards, falling on bad times, may revert to outlawry.

+

Routine, Discretion and Playability

+

There’s a term that’s used in criticism of many computer games which is worth thinking about hard here: that term is ‘farming’. ‘Farming’, in this sense, is doing something repetitive and dull to earn credits in a game. Generally this is not fun. What makes roles in a game-world fun is having individual discretion — the ability to choose between actions and strategies — and a lack of routine.

+

Most craft skills — especially in the learning phase — are not like this, and crafts which are sophisticated enough to be actually engaging are very hard to model in a game. Learning a craft is essentially, inherently, repetitive and dull, and if you take that repetition out of it you probably don’t have enough left to yield the feeling of mastery which would reward success; so it doesn’t seem to me that making craft roles playable should be a priority.

+

Cruise control

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One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Witcher 3 — still my go-to game for ideas I want to improve on — is simply travelling through the world. Although fast travel is possible I find I rarely use it, and a journey which takes fifteen minutes of real world wall clock time can be enjoyable in and of itself. This is, of course, a credit to the beautiful way the world is realised.

+

(It’s worth noting that Kenshi, a game I’m coming to greatly admire, does not allow fast travel at all, but has an equivalent of ‘cruise control’ — you can set a destination and then accelerate time and simply watch as your characters journey).

+

But nevertheless, in The Witcher 3, a decision was made to pack incident fairly densely — because players would find just travelling boring. This leads to a situation where peaceful villages exist two minutes travel from dangerous monsters or bandit camps, and the suspension of disbelief gets a little strained. Building a world big enough that a market simulation is believable means that for the individual, the travel time to a market where a particular desired good is likely to be cheaper becomes costly in itself. Otherwise, there’s no arbitrage between markets and no ecological niche for a merchant to fill. The journey time from market to market has to be several in-game days.

+

An in-game day doesn’t have to be as long as a wall clock day, and, indeed, typically isn’t. But nevertheless, doing several game days of incident-free travel, even in beautiful scenery, is not going to be engaging — which implies a fast-travel mechanic.

+

I don’t like fast travel, I find it a too-obvious breaking of immersion. Also, of course, one of the interesting things about a game in a merchant/outlaw ecosystem is the risk of interception on a journey. The Dragon Age series handled interrupted travel in ‘fast travel’ by randomly interrupting the loading screen you get when moving from location to location in Dragon Age’s patchwork worlds by dumping you into a tiny arena with enemies. That’s really, really bad — there’s no other way to say this. Everything about it shouts artifice.

+

So I’m thinking of a different mechanism: one I’m calling cruise control.

+

You set out on a task which will take a long time — such as a journey, but also such as any routine task. You’re shown either a ‘fast forward’ of your character carrying out this task, or a series of cinematic ‘shots along the way’. This depends, of course, on there being continuous renderable landscape between your departure and your destination, but there will be. This fast-forward proceeds at a substantially higher time gearing than normal game time — ten times as fast perhaps; we need it to, because as well as doing backgound scenery loading to move from one location to another, we’re also simulating lots of non-player agents’ actions in parts of the world where the player currently isn’t. So a ‘jump cut’ from one location to another isn’t going to work anyway.

+

The player can interrupt ‘fast forward’ at any time. But also, the game itself may bring you out of fast forward when it anticipates that there may be action which requires decision — for example, when there are outlaws in the vicinity. And it will do this before the player’s party is under immediate attack — the player will have time to take stock of the situation and prepare appropriately. Finally, this will take place in the full open world; the player will have the option to choose not to enter the narrow defile, for example, to ask local people (if there are any) for any news of outlaw activity, or, if they are available, to send forward scouts.

+
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html b/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bfd002d --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ + +Sexual dimorphism

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Sexual dimorphism

+

This essay is going to upset a lot of people, so let’s start with a statement of what it is about: it is an attempt to describe the systematically different behaviours of men and women, in sufficient detail that this can be represented by agents in a game world. It’s trying to allow as broad as possible a range of cultures to be represented, so when I’m talking about what I consider to be behaviours of particular cultures, I’ll say that.

+

Of course, I’m writing this from the view point of an old white male. It’s not possible to write about these things from a totally neutral viewpoint, and every one of us will have prejudices.

+

OK? Let’s start.

+

When a man and a woman have sex, there’s a non-zero chance that the woman will get pregnant. There’s a zero chance that the male will get pregnant.

+

A woman can typically give birth to of the order of twelve children in the course of her life, and each childbirth involves a non-zero risk of death. If modelling the sort of bronze-age-to-late-medieval cultures I’m generally considering, there are no available reliable methods of contraception, although there may be, for example, known spermicidal or abortifacient spells or potions. If it’s abortifacient, that’s pretty unpleasant for the woman, too.

+

Children, especially when young, are very vulnerable and need protection. Children with good protection are much more likely to survive to adulthood. Raising children involves a fair amount of work.

+

For all sorts of reasons, some of which are clearly cultural but others of which are fundamental, it’s much easier for men to walk away from responsibility for their children than it is for women. For example, considering a pre-modern world, women would always know for certain which children were theirs, and men would not.

+

For a woman, consequently, the best breeding strategy is to have sex only with men who will be ‘good fathers’, where there are three essential parameters to “good fathers”:

+
    +
  1. Desirable genetic traits;
    2. +
  2. Preparedness to stick around and share the work;
    3. +
  3. Ability to provide and protect.
    4. +
+

The essential trade-off in the traditional western marriage is that the man gets to have sex, and the woman gets to have protection for her progeny.

+

Another significant point is that women’s ability to bear children ceases at a much younger age than men’s ability to father them.

+

Why have sex at all?

+

If a character has ‘having children’ — the Ancestor aspiration, in my typology — as their key aim, then they will want to have sex. But to have children in this sense is to have acknowledged children, so while a male character may be motivated to have multiple female partners, he will never the less have some degree of long term committment to them, and will want both to feel confident that the children are his and to be recognised by their father.

+

From the point of view of seeking to become an Ancestor, there is little benefit to the woman in having multiple partners, except in very harsh environments. It will be easier to give one partner confidence that all your children are his, and while a man can increase his number of potential progeny by having multiple wives, mistresses or other classes of long-term female sexual partners, a woman cannot.

+

Why have children?

+

In modern Scotland, I have met a lot of women with a strong drive to have children for the sake of having children, where the best explanation they could give is that it’s instinctual; it may be so. But beyond that, in many cultures children provide their (acknowledged) parents with care and security in their old age, may tend their graves and perform belief-related services after they die, and carry on their name and their stories into the future.

+

Not everyone wants to have children; in thinking about the driving aspirations of game characters, I view having children one of six potential key aspirations.

+

Why else have sex?

+

Sex, done right, is an extremely pleasant pastime. Sex can also be used to create and maintain bonds of committment, to demonstrate social status, to defuse tense situations, and transactionally in many ways, both formal and informal.

+

For women, sex with other women carries with it no risk of pregnancy, so can be enjoyed or used for any of these purposes in very much the same way as it can by men; in other words, particularly for women, homosexual sex can be more lighthearted and carefree than heterosexual sex. To what extend our notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality are cultural I simply don’t know. But because no children will result, a woman can afford to be more promiscuous with other women than she can with men.

+

Women and warrior/adventurer lifestyles

+

Generally speaking, people do not want to take their children onto a battlefield. If you’re going to have a game world in which women significantly take on warrior or adventurer roles, then you must either have

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    +
  • A culture which expects female warriors to be celibate; or
    • +
  • A culture with access to and acceptance of safe and reliable contraception or abortion; or
    • +
  • An acceptance of leaving infant children with grandparents, other relatives or foster carers for long periods;
    • +
  • A system of long term creches;
    • +
  • Any combination of the above.
    • +
+
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Genetic Buildings

+

Building selection based on location

+

The objective of this note is to create a landscape with varied and believable buildings, with the minimum possible data storage per instance.

+

Like plants, buildings will ‘grow’ from a seed which has northing and easting attributes. These locate a position on the map. Again, like trees, some aspects of the building type selector are location based. Aspects of the location which are relevant to building type are

+
    +
  • elevation — derived from the map location by interpolation from grid. The actual interpolation algorithm is probably some form of spline, but in any case it’s the same one as for everything else.
    • +
  • orientation of slope — derived by taking altitude at four corners of a 100 metre square centred on the seed point, and then taking the highest and lowest of these. If highest is northwest, lowest is southeast, the slope is considered to be oriented southeast; if highest is northwest and lowest southwest, the orientation is considered to be south, and so on. Eight orientation values are sufficient.
    • +
  • gradient of slope — derived from the difference in altitude across the same 100 metre square
    • +
  • neighbours — number of other buildings in 500 metre square centred on seed point.
    • +
+

The reason orientation is relevant is exactly the same as the reason it’s relevant to trees. West facing slopes are assumed wetter (coriolis winds), so grow trees better, so better availability of better quality timber, so a higher probability of timber as a primary building material. But also, in areas of higher rainfall, rain shedding is an important consideration, so a higher value is placed on pitched roofs.

+

So you have the following general relationships

+
    +
  • west (or southwest or northwest) facing, moderate gradient, moderate altitude: high probability of timber construction; construction techniques involving large timbers (e.g. cruck frame); greater probability of shingled roofs;
    • +
  • west (or southwest or northwest) facing, moderate gradient, higher altitude or northern latitude: high probability of building styles adapted to straight-trunk conifers, e.g. log cabins, stave buildings; greater probability of shingled roofs;
    • +
  • east facing, generally: greater probability of flat roofs;
    • +
  • steeper gradients: greater probability of stone buildings (steeper gradients = shallower topsoil and greater ease of quarrying = access to stone); greater probability of slate roofs;
    • +
  • shallower gradients: greater probability of mud, cobb, brick or wattle-and-daub as building materials; greater probability of thatch or turf roofs;
    • +
  • Higher number of neighbours: higher probability of two or more stories;
    • +
+

These factors allow classes of building to be selected. Having got past that point, we need to consider how classes of genetic building can work.

+

Rectangular genetic buildings

+

Some genetic buildings will have cells with rectangular plan. This doesn’t mean that genetic buildings are required to have rectangular cells, but they provide a starting point for discussion. For a given class of building (for example, timber frame), a number of prototype models of cells exist. These models are fully realised three dimensional models. Possibly all cells belonging to the building class have two open ends, and end walls exist as separate models; equally possibly, some cells have only one extensible end. In any case, a building will not normally comprise a single cell. Normally it will comprise multiple cells. So the cells belonging to a particular building class will be designed to ‘plug together’. Multi story building classes will have some cells which are specifically ground floor only (flat ceiling, no roof), and such cells will always have an upper floor cell added above them. Where an upper floor cell has an outside door, an outside stair will automatically be added.

+

Cell mutability

+

Although cell models are repeatedly reused they don’t have to look the same every time they are reused. Within limits, every cell can be stretched along any of its three axes. Obviously, the degree of stretch on a given axis for every cell in a given building must be the same, otherwise they won’t line up. Another mutable area is skinning — it may be possible to have alternate skins for cells, and even if there are not alternate skins, it will be possible to mutably darken, lighten or otherwise tint the skins used, within ranges which are appropriate to the materials represented. Obviously there are limits to stretching — timber comes in only such a length, stone lintels will only support such a span.

+

Functional cells

+

Some trade functions require cells of particular kinds. Thus a smith needs a working building with one cell which is explicitly a forge. A water mill must have one cell which explicitly houses the mill gear. A forge cell or a waterwheel cell should never appear in weavers workshop. But most cells are not dedicated in this way. A bedroom cell is a bedroom cell, more or less; wealth may alter how it is furnished, but it may appear in any dwelling. Similarly, except for the very wealthy, a living cell is pretty much a living cell. And any building may incorporate a storage cell. If a given building class has twelve distinct ‘generic’ cells’ and half a dozen distinct functional cells, and if buildings in the class average four cells each, then ignoring variance caused by skin mutability, a street of fifty buildings could have every one different.

+

Reproducibility

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It’s critical that if a player visits a location, leaves it, and then returns, the buildings should not all have changed. So it must be possible to repeatedly reproduce the building at the location (this, of course, applies to other procedural scene dressing, such as trees, roads, boundaries, bridges and so on). This is possible if a deterministic random number generator is used which is seeded from the latitude and longitude attributes of the location. Other attributes which should be cached on the seed even though they are determined procedurally when the building is first instantiated include building class, purpose, and wealth. Using these attributes and the deterministic random number generator, the same building can be reproduced on the same site each time it is visited, with a very small amount of data stored.

+

Buildings will normally be built at the edge of the associated land holding. If an edge of the land holding adjoins a road, then the building will be built with one long side aligned to the road. Otherwise, the building will be built at right angles to the orientation of the slope. The orientation will be ‘frozen’ once the building has been instantiated and will be cached on the seed.

+

So, to build a building, use the following algorithm:

+

Seed the random number generator with latitude and longitude

+
while ( building value is less than wealth) {
+   select a cell selected from the building class using the next number from the random number generator modulo the number of generic cells in the class;
+   if the selected cell is not inappropriate to the building's function {
+       fit the cell to the building at the point determined by a deterministic algorithm
+       furnish cell using the random number generator to determine
+       furnishing types and locations from a selection appropriate to the cell
+       if the selected cell was not a top story cell {
+            add a requirement that the next cell selected must be an upper story cell}
+   }
+}
+
+
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Modelling trading cost and risk

+

In a dynamic pre-firearms world with many small states and contested regions, trade is not going to be straightforward. Not only will different routes have different physical characteristics - more or less mountainous, more or fewer unbridged river crossings - they will also have different political characteristics: more of less taxed, more or less effectively policed.

+

Raids by outlaws are expected to be part of the game economy. News of raids are the sort of things which may propagate through the gossip system. So are changes in taxation regime. Obviously, knowledge items can affect merchants’ trading strategy; in existing prototype code, individual merchants already each keep their own cache of known historical prices, and exchange historical price data with one another; and use this price data to select trades to make.

+

So: to what extent is it worth modelling the spread of knowledge of trade cost and risk?

+

Obviously the more we model, the more compute power modelling consumes. If the core objective is a Role Playing Games as currently understood, then there is no need to model very complex trade risk assessment behaviour.

+
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/resources/data/crafts.edn b/resources/data/crafts.edn index 74141d5..77e29e7 100644 --- a/resources/data/crafts.edn +++ b/resources/data/crafts.edn @@ -1,5 +1,26 @@ -{:blacksmith {:workplace :forge - :supplies #{:axe :chisel :plough :knife} - :customers #{:farmer :cook} - :min-customers - :trade :smith}} \ No newline at end of file +(def craft-ranks {:apprentice {:social-rank 1 :independent? false} + :journeyman {:social-rank 2 :independent? false} + :master {:social-rank 3} :independent? true}) + +(def scholar-ranks {:student {:social-rank 2 :independent? false} + :scholar {:social-rank 3 :independent? true} + :sage {:social-rank 4 :independent? true}}) + +(declare all-crafts) + +{ + :blacksmith {:workplace :forge + :supplies #{:axe :chisel :hammer :pick :plough :knife} + :customers #{:peasant :nomad :cook} + :min-customers {:solo 5 :per-apprentice 1 :per-journeyman 3} + :trade :smith + :ranks craft-ranks} + :weaponsmith {:workplace :forge + :supplies #{:axe :knife :sword :spear} + :customers #{:soldier :outlaw} + :min-customers {:solo 5 :per-apprentice 1 :per-journeyman 3} + :trade :smith + :ranks craft-ranks} + :baker {:workplace :bakehouse + :supplies #{:bread :cake} + :customers all-crafts}} \ No newline at end of file