A Generic Planning Algorithm for craftworker NPCs
+Generated by Codox
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A Generic Planning Algorithm for craftworker NPCs
Preamble
The Great Game requires a number of different crafts to be performed, both because the economy depends on the products of those crafts and to provide verisimilitude and set dressing. Some of those crafts, the relations between them, and the progression within them are set out in Populating a game world.
For the purposes of planning work, only Master craftspeople are considered.
diff --git a/docs/codox/API_Spec.html b/docs/codox/API_Spec.html index 72e1bf8..95affa0 100644 --- a/docs/codox/API_Spec.html +++ b/docs/codox/API_Spec.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Generated by Codox
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API Spec (unfinished)
+Generated by Codox
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API Spec (unfinished)
If the Gossip system is ever to be deployed in practice at all, it will need to be deployed as a library add-on to someone else’s game, since in practice The Great Game will never be even nearly finished. The game engine already knows many of the things the Gossip system needs to know; that we need to define is an interface which allows Gossip, considered as a subsystem, to query the game engine.
My preference is still that Gossip should be written in a Lisp-like language - and, for now, in Clojure - simply because that is most comfortable to me. It needs bidirectional socket communication with the game engine, over which it sends either extensible data notation or JavaScript Object Notation, with a preference for the former.
Tracking what happens in the world
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Appraisal (unfinished)
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Appraisal (unfinished)
What is Appraisal
There’s an thing that all non player characters can do, which varies greatly from person to person, and which is of particular importance to merchants, and that is appraisal.
Each category of goods has different dimensions of quality. A sword may be evaluated, for example, on
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Baking the world
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Baking the world
Wednesday, 8 May 2019
Devorgilla’s Bridge in Dumfries, early fourteenth century. This clearly shows how a genetic buildings approach to bridges can be made to work: a single element is repeated to span the necessary distance. That element can be stretched vertically and laterally to match the location, and can be rendered in different stone finishes to match local geology.
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Biomes and ecology (unfinished)
+Generated by Codox
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Biomes and ecology (unfinished)
The motivation for this document was to explain the mulberry trees in the Tcha valley, and think about why Tchahua is especially a centre for the silk trade
Broader geography
The broader geography of the world is not a matter for this document, but TODO: there isn’t yet a document which usefully describes it, and there needs to be.
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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.
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.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Canonical-dictionary.html b/docs/codox/Canonical-dictionary.html index 55a31d0..82eff50 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Canonical-dictionary.html +++ b/docs/codox/Canonical-dictionary.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Generated by Codox
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Canonical dictionary for this documentation
+Generated by Codox
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Canonical dictionary for this documentation
Where a word is used in the documentation for The Great Game and its related projects, this file describes the canonical meaning of that word. This is because a lot of the concepts in play are messy and ambiguous, so that at times even I am confused by what I mean. The presence of this file is an acknowledment of this difficulty, and an implicit admission that not all the documentation is, at this stage anyway, consistent.
Actor
An actor is a thing which performs actions within the game world. Thus a tree is (almost certainly) not an actor, and things like sheep and rabbits that run about are probably not actors, but an animal which may pro-actively interact with the player character (such as a predator, or a beast of burden, or even a prey species which may flee) is an actor. In god mode, if implemented, the player can inhabit any actor within the game world.
Generated by Codox
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Division of tasks between server and client
+Generated by Codox
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Division of tasks between server and client
An alternative nomentclature I may use for this dichotomy would be planner and performer; it would be the same dichotomy. ‘Planner’ and ‘server’ are synonyms; ‘performer’ and ‘client’ are synonyms.
What do I mean by the ‘server’?
There is something which manages game state and things like the gossip network, merchant network, and major world events. This something is almost certainly written in some form of Lisp; I’d prefer Clojure but I don’t think it’s performant enough so probably Common Lisp. This means that it has inevitable pauses for garbage collection. Underneath this is a database which handles persistent storage of game state, which is probably an SQL database and quite likely SQLite.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Dynamic-consequences.html b/docs/codox/Dynamic-consequences.html index c3e974a..48c278d 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Dynamic-consequences.html +++ b/docs/codox/Dynamic-consequences.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Generated by Codox
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On the consequences of a dynamic game environment for storytelling
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On the consequences of a dynamic game environment for storytelling
First, a framing disclaimer: in Racundra’s First Cruise, Arthur Ransome describes coming across a half built — and by the time he saw it, already obsolete — wooden sailing ship, in a Baltic forest. An old man was building it, by himself. He had been building it since he had been a young man. It’s clear that Ransome believed the ship would never be finished. It’s not clear whether the old man believed that it would, but nevertheless he was building it.
I will never build a complete version of The Great Game; it will probably never even be a playable prototype. It is a minor side-project of someone who
-
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@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-
-
diff --git a/docs/codox/Genetic-buildings.html b/docs/codox/Genetic-buildings.html
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-
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Genetic Buildings
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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
diff --git a/docs/codox/Gossip_scripted_plot_and_Johnny_Silverhand.html b/docs/codox/Gossip_scripted_plot_and_Johnny_Silverhand.html index d82fe47..ad7e010 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Gossip_scripted_plot_and_Johnny_Silverhand.html +++ b/docs/codox/Gossip_scripted_plot_and_Johnny_Silverhand.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Gossip, scripted plot, and Johnny Silverhand Generated by Codox
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Gossip, scripted plot, and Johnny Silverhand
+Gossip, scripted plot, and Johnny Silverhand Generated by Codox
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Gossip, scripted plot, and Johnny Silverhand
I’ve been writing literally for years — since Voice acting considered harmful in 2015 — about game worlds in which the player speaks to non-player characters just by speaking the words they choose in their normal voice, and the non-player character replies using a pipeline that goes, essentially,
- Alexa/Siri style speech interpretation; diff --git a/docs/codox/MVP-Roadmap.html b/docs/codox/MVP-Roadmap.html index 25bb614..0a7fc7e 100644 --- a/docs/codox/MVP-Roadmap.html +++ b/docs/codox/MVP-Roadmap.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -
- Kill quests diff --git a/docs/codox/Pathmaking.html b/docs/codox/Pathmaking.html index 62bc5c1..53e2127 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Pathmaking.html +++ b/docs/codox/Pathmaking.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -
:active- actors within visual/audible range of the player character;
-:pending- actors not in the active circle, but sufficiently close to it that they may enter the active circle within a short period;
-:background- actors who are active in the background in order to handle trade, news, et cetera;
-:other- actors who are not members of any other circle.
-- Ground floor modules, having external doors; diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.rectangular.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.rectangular.html deleted file mode 100644 index 95c6f4c..0000000 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.rectangular.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ - -
- To establish the broad principle of genetic buildings, by creating a function which reproducibly creates reproducible buildings at specified locations, such that different buildings are credibly varied but a building at a specified location is always (modulo economic change) the same. -
- Create good rectangular buildings, and investigate whether a single function can be used to create buildings of more than one family (e.g. can it produce flat roofed, north African style, mud brick houses as well as pitch roofed, half timbered northern European houses?) -
- Establish whether, in my current state of fairly severe mental illness, I can actually produce any usable code at all. -
- terrain types to which it is appropriate; -
- crafts to which it is appropriate; -
- cultures to which it is appropriate. -
Minimum Viable Product, and a road map Generated by Codox
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Minimum Viable Product, and a road map
+Minimum Viable Product, and a road map Generated by Codox
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Minimum Viable Product, and a road map
Right, I’m bogged down thinking about the immensity of what I want to build, so I’m achieving nothing. So the first thing I need to state is what the Minimum Viable Product is, and the second is to outline a rough road map which takes us forwards a few steps from the MVP.
The core idea here is to have a game world in which you can just say anything you like to game characters, and they can say sensible things back.
But actually, I know that speech to text can be reasonably effectively done; and I believe with a slightly lower degree of confidence that text to convincing speech can also be done.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Modelling_democracy_and_morale.html b/docs/codox/Modelling_democracy_and_morale.html index c06f3d3..73bfb73 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Modelling_democracy_and_morale.html +++ b/docs/codox/Modelling_democracy_and_morale.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -The Red Company: modelling democracy and morale (unfinished) Generated by Codox
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The Red Company: modelling democracy and morale (unfinished)
+The Red Company: modelling democracy and morale (unfinished) Generated by Codox
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The Red Company: modelling democracy and morale (unfinished)
Background
The Great Game exists as a project on two levels. One one level, it’s a framework for building algorithms to build much more vibrant, and thus enjoyable game worlds; at another level, it’s about building a particular world, in which I want to tell stories.
The world in which I want to tell stories is a world which is based roughly on late bronze age to medieval Europe. It’s a world in which the region known as ‘The Coast’ — the southern littoral of the continent — had been a mostly-peaceful matrideic dispersed agrarian tribal society, which had been invaded some hundreds of years past by a warrior tribe with substantially better military technology.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Modelling_trading_cost_and_risk.html b/docs/codox/Modelling_trading_cost_and_risk.html index b7f266b..21860b9 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Modelling_trading_cost_and_risk.html +++ b/docs/codox/Modelling_trading_cost_and_risk.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Modelling trading cost and risk (unfinished) Generated by Codox
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Modelling trading cost and risk (unfinished)
+Modelling trading cost and risk (unfinished) Generated by Codox
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Modelling trading cost and risk (unfinished)
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?
diff --git a/docs/codox/My-setting.html b/docs/codox/My-setting.html deleted file mode 100644 index 60a7047..0000000 --- a/docs/codox/My-setting.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ - -My setting for the Great Game Generated by Codox
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/Naming-of-characters.html b/docs/codox/Naming-of-characters.html index 2342e2e..7d348c9 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Naming-of-characters.html +++ b/docs/codox/Naming-of-characters.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -My setting for the Great Game
-It should be evident that all the key ideas in The Great Game project would be applicable to games set in the historic past of our world, to games set in its present, or to games set in some imagined or forecast future; the ideas are intended to be, and I believe are, largely independent of setting.
-Nevertheless I feel the need for a concrete setting to ground the development of ideas. I’ve chosen deliberately not to place that setting in the real world; although it’s broadly based on cultures from the late bronze age/early iron age mediterrainian.
-Naming of Characters Generated by Codox
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Naming of Characters
+Naming of Characters Generated by Codox
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Naming of Characters
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.
The full name of each character will be made up as follows:
epithet clan personal-name the trade-or-rank of location, son/daughter of parent
diff --git a/docs/codox/NewCh1.html b/docs/codox/NewCh1.html deleted file mode 100644 index 09abe76..0000000 --- a/docs/codox/NewCh1.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13 +0,0 @@ - -Axiom Generated by Codox
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/Not_my_problem.html b/docs/codox/Not_my_problem.html index 94dd37d..fec3600 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Not_my_problem.html +++ b/docs/codox/Not_my_problem.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Axiom
-It is at once natural and yet extraordinary; at once familiar and yet always uncanny. Strange, yet still a part of the landscape of my life since earliest childhood. Circular, about three and a half metres across, of unknown depth; filled with clear water which neither rises in time of flood nor falls in time of drought, which is never warm in summer yet rarely freezes in winter. And its level is always, always, always, about a metre higher than the level of the burn which flows around three sides of the rock through which it rises.
-The well is liminal: a gateway between the world of air and the world of water, the world of men and the underworld, the world of sunlight and the world of darkness. It is the place where – my mother always claimed – I was conceived; and for too many people whom I have known, the gateway between life and death, through which none pass twice.
-It is the Cauld Well: the Cauld Well of Scotland. The Well of Sorrows. According to folklore, a place of blessings and ancient magic. According to historians, the last site in Britain where the Celtic gods were regularly worshipped.
-And it is mine.
-Tentatively Curious
-Cryptography is the science of hiding things. The modern methods of hiding things are well known; they’re based on mathematical problems which are very hard to solve unless you already have a known starting point. For now, they work very well; but the problem with mathematical problems which are very hard to solve is that computers are steadily getting better and better at solving things.
-Encryption is important; it is everywhere. It secures our communications, our wealth, our identity, our secrets. Many people – people with a great deal of money to spend – are very interested in the science of hiding things: in ensuring things are hidden, or else in finding things which others have hidden.
-Unfortunately, the person who I wanted to find, in the spring of 2015 – who I had wanted to find since I’d lost her in the autumn of 2012 – could not be found by solving hard sums. In that spring, in fact, lots of things were hidden from me. Things which were hidden in plain sight, which were urgently important;
-Like A. A. Milne’s King John, I am not a good man. Like him, I have my little ways. And very often no one speaks to me for days and days and days; although, to be fair, these past three years I hadn’t much encourage them to.
-The university mostly understood that. My research – and to some degree my name – still brought in money; my papers were still well received. I no longer taught undergraduates, but I had a select group of excellent postgrads. And my colleagues accepted that I needed time to grieve.
Not my problem Generated by Codox
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# Not my problem
+Not my problem Generated by Codox
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# Not my problem
Introduction
This document is essentially a catalogue of side-tracks which I do not have to go down when implementing The Great Game. Solved problems; or problems which are common to many other games, so if I don’t solve them someone else will. The object of doing this is to work down to a constrained set of problems which are genuinely things I’m trying to innovate, which I should focus on; which essentially come down to
-
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--- a/docs/codox/On-dying.html
+++ b/docs/codox/On-dying.html
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-
On Dying, and Injury Generated by Codox
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On Dying, and Injury
+On Dying, and Injury Generated by Codox
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On Dying, and Injury
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.
So how could this be better handled?
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.
diff --git a/docs/codox/On-sex-and-sexual-violence.html b/docs/codox/On-sex-and-sexual-violence.html index aaab08d..00f8de0 100644 --- a/docs/codox/On-sex-and-sexual-violence.html +++ b/docs/codox/On-sex-and-sexual-violence.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -On Sex, and Sexual Violence, in Games Generated by Codox
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On Sex, and Sexual Violence, in Games
+On Sex, and Sexual Violence, in Games Generated by Codox
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On Sex, and Sexual Violence, in Games
For me the purpose of games is to provide worlds in which players can explore moral actions, and the consequences of moral actions. Sexual violence is something that happens in the real world, and which happens, even within the real world, more frequently in areas of poor governance and open conflict; and those are areas in which there are important moral actions, and important moral consequences, so they are areas in which it is interesting to set games.
It would be ludicrous to argue ‘sexual violence is wrong, therefore we should not represent it in games.’ Killing people is also wrong, yet it is extremely common in games. However, sexual violence — and in particular the representation of sexual violence — does pose some specific problems that need to be addressed.
Firstly, sexual violence is extremely gendered. Yes, male people are sometimes subjected to sexual violence, but nevertheless the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual violence are female. Yes, female people are sometimes — extraordinarily rarely, but sometimes — perpetrators of sexual violence, but nevertheless perpetrators of sexual violence are almost exclusively male.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Organic_Quests.html b/docs/codox/Organic_Quests.html index dc5d81c..4ec1afc 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Organic_Quests.html +++ b/docs/codox/Organic_Quests.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Organic Quests Generated by Codox
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Organic Quests
+Organic Quests Generated by Codox
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Organic Quests
The structure of a modern Role Playing Came revolves around ‘quests’: tasks that the player character is invited to do, either by the framing narrative of the game or by some non-player character (‘the Quest Giver’). Normally there is one core quest which provides the overarching narrative for the whole game. Wikipedia offers a typology of quests as follows:
Pathmaking Generated by Codox
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Pathmaking
+Pathmaking Generated by Codox
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Pathmaking
NOTE: this file is called ‘pathmaking’, not ‘pathfinding’, because ‘pathfinding’ has a very specific meaning/usage in game design which is only part of what I want to talk about here.
NOTE: Work on this is being carried on in a separate library, Walkmap, q.v.
Stages in creating routes between locations
diff --git a/docs/codox/Populating-a-game-world.html b/docs/codox/Populating-a-game-world.html index 95844f1..b116480 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Populating-a-game-world.html +++ b/docs/codox/Populating-a-game-world.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Populating a game world Generated by Codox
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Populating a game world
+Populating a game world Generated by Codox
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Populating a game world
Saturday, 6 July 2013
(You might want to read this essay in conjunction with my older essay, Settling a game world, which covers similar ground but which this hopefully advances on)
For an economy to work people have to be able to move between occupations to fill economic niches. In steady state, non player character (NPC) males become adult as ‘vagrants’, and then move through the state transitions described in this document. The pattern for females is different.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Roadmap.html b/docs/codox/Roadmap.html index c0558fc..d126339 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Roadmap.html +++ b/docs/codox/Roadmap.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Roadmap (obsolete) Generated by Codox
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Roadmap (obsolete)
+Roadmap (obsolete) Generated by Codox
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Roadmap (obsolete)
This document outlines a plan to move forward from where I am in June 2021.
NOTE: this document has been superceded.
JMonkeyEngine
diff --git a/docs/codox/Sandbox.html b/docs/codox/Sandbox.html index 5e8679b..0dab2d2 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Sandbox.html +++ b/docs/codox/Sandbox.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Sandbox Generated by Codox
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Sandbox
+Sandbox Generated by Codox
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/Selecting_Character.html b/docs/codox/Selecting_Character.html index cb5d790..365ee92 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Selecting_Character.html +++ b/docs/codox/Selecting_Character.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Sandbox
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.
Why?
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
@@ -31,11 +31,11 @@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
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.
+(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).
Selecting the Player Character Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Selecting the Player Character
+Selecting the Player Character Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Selecting the Player Character
Background
Many computer role playing games, particularly older ones such as Neverwinter Nights, allow you to ‘design’ your player character from a fairly broad canvas. Race, class, attributes, gender and appearance are all selectable.
Choice has eroded over time. For example the Dragon Age series, where you can chose between three races, two genders, and a small number of classes. In the Mass Effect trilogy, you play as Shepard, who is human and essentially a Fighter, but can be either male or female and whose appearance you can customise. You can play as either lawful good or chaotic neutral. In Cyberpunk 2077, you play as V, who is human, either male or female, essentially a Fighter, and chaotic neutral.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Settling-a-game-world.html b/docs/codox/Settling-a-game-world.html index 4be912d..98052f5 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Settling-a-game-world.html +++ b/docs/codox/Settling-a-game-world.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Settling a game world Generated by Codox
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Settling a game world
+Settling a game world Generated by Codox
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Settling a game world
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
This essay is part of a series with ‘Worlds and Flats’ and ‘The spread of knowledge in a large game world’; if you haven’t read those you may want to read them before reading this. This essay describes how a large world can come into being and can evolve. I’ve written again on this subject since - see ‘Populating a game world’)
Microworld
diff --git a/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html b/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html index bfd002d..59393d8 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html +++ b/docs/codox/Sexual-dimorphism.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Sexual dimorphism Generated by Codox
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Sexual dimorphism
+Sexual dimorphism Generated by Codox
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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.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Simulated-genetics.html b/docs/codox/Simulated-genetics.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d5e9f2a --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/codox/Simulated-genetics.html @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ + +Simulated Genetics Generated by Codox
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+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.
+Simulation layers Generated by Codox
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Simulation layers
+Simulation layers Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Simulation layers
In essence, the environment for The Great Game is broadly descended from games like the original Elite space trading game, and Sid Meier’s Pirates!, with some elements from political simulations like for example SimCity.
That is to say there is
An economy simulation
diff --git a/docs/codox/The-spread-of-knowledge-in-a-large-game-world.html b/docs/codox/The-spread-of-knowledge-in-a-large-game-world.html index 064fadc..f4208d9 100644 --- a/docs/codox/The-spread-of-knowledge-in-a-large-game-world.html +++ b/docs/codox/The-spread-of-knowledge-in-a-large-game-world.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -The spread of knowledge in a large game world Generated by Codox
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The spread of knowledge in a large game world
+The spread of knowledge in a large game world Generated by Codox
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The spread of knowledge in a large game world
Saturday, 26 April 2008
Note
This version of this essay has been adapted to use the code in
diff --git a/docs/codox/Things_Voice_Interaction_Enables.html b/docs/codox/Things_Voice_Interaction_Enables.html index c7a5549..f6d27c1 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Things_Voice_Interaction_Enables.html +++ b/docs/codox/Things_Voice_Interaction_Enables.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -the-great-game.gossip.news-items, q.v.. The original version of the essay is still available on my blog.Things Voice Interaction Enables Generated by Codox
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Things Voice Interaction Enables
+Things Voice Interaction Enables Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Things Voice Interaction Enables
Organic quest routing
In a world in which you can talk to non-player characters, and in which non-player characters know the directions to things which are local to their homes (and some, travellers, will be able to give you routes to things further away), when you need to get to your next waypoint you can just ask for directions. That much is easy.
But something much richer occurred to me.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Uncanny_dialogue.html b/docs/codox/Uncanny_dialogue.html index 496f36f..bd58062 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Uncanny_dialogue.html +++ b/docs/codox/Uncanny_dialogue.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -The Uncanny Valley, and dynamically generated dialogue Generated by Codox
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The Uncanny Valley, and dynamically generated dialogue
+The Uncanny Valley, and dynamically generated dialogue Generated by Codox
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The Uncanny Valley, and dynamically generated dialogue
If the player is allowed to just speak arbitrary dialogue, then the conversation animation of the player character cannot be designed. If non-player characters are able to engage dynamically generated dialogue, in response to events in the game which are not scripted, then their conversation animation for those dialogues cannot be designed. So conversation animation must almost always be dynamically generated, largely from an augmented text of the speech act. With non-player characters, emotional content of a speech act can be generated by exactly the same process which generates the text. Extracting emotional content information from the player character’s voice may be more challenging.
It would be possible to avoid animating the player character’s face by using a first-person camera. However, I don’t personally find this makes for a very engaging game experience.
These thoughts were prompted by a very interesting video and Twitter thread about the perceived failings in the character animation system of Mass Effect Andromeda.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Voice-acting-considered-harmful.html b/docs/codox/Voice-acting-considered-harmful.html index d8711d4..01c4a4e 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Voice-acting-considered-harmful.html +++ b/docs/codox/Voice-acting-considered-harmful.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Voice acting considered harmful Generated by Codox
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Voice acting considered harmful
+Voice acting considered harmful Generated by Codox
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Voice acting considered harmful
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Long, long, time ago, I can still remember when… we played (and wrote) adventure games where the user typed at a command line, and the system printed back at them. A Read-Eval-Print loop in the classic Lisp sense, and I wrote my adventure games in Lisp. I used the same opportunistic parser whether the developer was building the game
diff --git a/docs/codox/Worlds-and-flats.html b/docs/codox/Worlds-and-flats.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6cc6d8e --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/codox/Worlds-and-flats.html @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ + +Worlds and flats [obsolete] Generated by Codox
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+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.
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.agent.agent documentation Generated by Codox
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Anything in the game world with agency; primarily but not exclusively characters.
-ProtoAgent
protocol
An object which can act in the world
-members
act
(act actor world circle)Allow
-actorto do something in thisworld, in the context of thiscircle; return the new state of the actor if something was done,nilif nothing was done.Circleis expected to be one of-
-
The
-actmethod must not have side effects; it must only return a new state. If the actor’s intention is to seek to change the state of something else in the game world, it must add a representation of that intention to the sequence which will be returned by itspending-intentionsmethod.hungry?
(hungry? actor world circle)True if this actor is hungry and has no immediate access to food.
-pending-intentions
(pending-intentions actor)Returns a sequence of effects an actor intends, as a consequence of acting.
-pending-scheduled-action?
(pending-scheduled-action? actor world circle)True if there is a plan in this
-actor’s schedule which should be activated now. NOTE THAT plans in thedailyschedule are NOT activated when in circles:backgroundor:otherplan-fight-or-flight
(plan-fight-or-flight actor world circle)Return a plan to resolve any active threat to this
-actorin thisworld.plan-find-food
(plan-find-food actor workd circle)Return a plan to find this
-actorfood in thisworld.plan-find-rest
(plan-find-rest actor workd circle)Return a plan to find this
-actora safe place to rest, or if in one, to actually rest, in thisworld.plan-goal
(plan-goal actor world circle)Return a plan to advance this
-actortowards their personal objective, in this world, ornilfor default actors with no objective.plan-scheduled-action
(plan-scheduled-action actor workd circle)Return a plan taken from the schedule of this actor for the current date and time, if any, else
-nil.schedule
(schedule actor)Return a map of scheduled actions for this
-actor. TODO: work out the detailed format!threatened?
(threatened? actor world circle)True if this
-actoris threatened in thisworld.tired?
(tired? actor world circle)True if this
-actorneeds rest.cc.journeyman.the-great-game.agent.schedule documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.agent.schedule
Schedules of plans for actors in the game, in order that they may have daily and seasonal patterns of behaviour.
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.agent.schedule documentation Generated by Codox
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module.html index ba1e846..cbd7288 100644 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module.html +++ b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.agent.schedule
Schedules of plans for actors in the game, in order that they may have daily and seasonal patterns of behaviour.
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module
A module of a building; essentially something like a portacabin, which can be assembled together with other modules to make a complete building.
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.module
A module of a building; essentially something like a portacabin, which can be assembled together with other modules to make a complete building.
Modules need to include
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.rectangular documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.cloverage.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.cloverage.html deleted file mode 100644 index 8f847a4..0000000 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.cloverage.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ - -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.buildings.rectangular
Build buildings with a generally rectangular floow plan.
-Motivations
-Right, the idea behind this namespace is many fold.
--
-
Key factors in the creation of a building
-Holding
-Every building is on a holding, and, indeed, what I mean by ‘building’ here may well turn out to be ’the collection of all the permanent structures on a holding. A holding is a polygonal area of the map which does not intersect with any other holding, but for the time being we’ll make the simplifying assumption that every holding is a rectangular strip, and that ‘urban’ holdings are of a reasonably standard width (see Viking-period York) and length. Rural holdings (farms, ?wood lots) may be much larger.
-Terrain
-A building is made of the stuff of the place. In a forest, buildings will tend to be wooden; in a terrain with rocky outcrops – normally found on steep slopes – stone. On the flat lands where there’s river mud, of brick, cob, or wattle and daub. So to build a building we need to know the terrain. Terrain can be inferred from location but in practice this will be computationally expensive, so we’ll pass terrain in as an argument to the build function.
-For the time being we’ll pass it in simply as a keyword from a defined set of keywords; later it may be a more sophisticated data structure.
-Culture
-People of different cultures build distinctively different buildings, even when using the same materials. So, in our world, a Japanese wooden house looks quite different from an Anglo Saxon stave house which looks quite different from a Canadian log cabin, even though the materials are much the same and the tools available to build with are not much different.
-Culture can affect not just the overall shape of a building but also its finish and surface detail. For example, in many places in England, stone buildings are typically left bare; in rural Scotland, typically painted white or in pastel shades; in Ireland, often quite vivid colours.
-People may also show religious or cultural symbols on their buildings.
-For all these reasons, we need to know the culture of the occupant when creating a building. Again, this will initially be passed in as a keyword.
-Craft
-People in the game world have a craft, and some crafts will require different features in the building. In the broadly late-bronze-age-to medieval period within which the game is set, residence and workplace are for most people pretty much the same.
-So a baker needs an oven, a smith a forge, and so on. All crafts who do some degree retail trade will want a shop front as part of the ground floor of their dwelling. Merchants and bankers will probably have houses that are a bit more showy than others.
-Whether the ‘genetic buildings’ idea will ever really produce suitable buildings for aristons I don’t know; it seems more likely that significant strongholds (of which there will be relatively few) should all be hand modelled rather than procedurally generated.
-*building-families*
dynamic
Families of buildings.
-Each family has
--
-
Each generated building will be of one family, and will comprise modules taken only from that family.
-*crafts*
dynamic
Crafts which affect building types in the game. See
-Populating a game world. TODO: placeholder*terrain-types*
dynamic
Types of terrain which affect building families. TODO: This is a placeholder; a more sophisticated model will be needed.
-build!
(build! holding terrain culture craft size)Builds a building, and returns a data structure which represents it. In building the building, it adds a model of the building to the representation of the world, so it does have a side effect.
-building-family
(building-family terrain culture craft gene)A building family is essentially a collection of models of building modules which can be assembled to create buildings of a particular structural and architectural style.
-cc.journeyman.the-great-game.cloverage documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.2-SNAPSHOT
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip.html index 050de15..9431123 100644 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip.html +++ b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.cloverage
TODO: write docs
-cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip
Interchange of news events between gossip agents.
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.gossip
Interchange of news events between gossip agents.
Note that habitual travellers are all gossip agents; specifically, at this stage, that means merchants. When merchants are moved we also need to update the location of the gossip with the same key.
Innkeepers are also gossip agents but do not typically move.
dialogue
(dialogue enquirer respondent world)Dialogue between an
diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items.html index 25f2550..8e65b18 100644 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items.html +++ b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -enquirerand anagentin thisworld; returns a map identical toenquirerexcept that its:gossipcollection may have additional entries.cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items
Using news items (propositions) to transfer knowledge between gossip agents.
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.gossip.news-items
Using news items (propositions) to transfer knowledge between gossip agents.
Status
What is here is essentially working. It’s not, however, working with the rich data objects which will be needed, and it’s not yet nearly efficient enough, but it allows knowledge to propagate through the world procedurally, at a rate limited by the speed of movement of the gossip agents.
Discussion
diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.holdings.holding.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.holdings.holding.html deleted file mode 100644 index a661aab..0000000 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.holdings.holding.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ - -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.holdings.holding documentation Generated by Codox
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location.html index f843370..baa26fd 100644 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location.html +++ b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.holdings.holding
TODO: write docs
-ProtoHolding
protocol
members
building-origin
(building-origin holding)Returns an oriented location - normally the right hand end of the frontage, for an urban holding - from which buildings on the holding should be built.
-frontage
(frontage holding)Returns a sequence of two locations representing the edge of the polygon which defines this holding which is considered to be the front.
-cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location
TODO: write docs
+cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location documentation Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
cc.journeyman.the-great-game.location.location
TODO: write docs
ProtoLocation
protocol
members
altitude
(altitude location)Return the absolute altitude of this location, which may be different from the terrain height at this location, if, for example, the location is underground or on an upper floor.
easting
(easting location)Return the easting of this location
northing
(northing location)Return the northing of this location
diff --git a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester.html b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester.html index acccd4e..e375cba 100644 --- a/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester.html +++ b/docs/codox/cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester.html @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester documentation Generated by Codox
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cc.journeyman.the-great-game.lore.digester
Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.2-SNAPSHOT
Game world economy
+Generated by Codox
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Game world economy
Broadly this essay extends ideas presented in Populating a game world, q.v.
Primary producers
Herdsfolk
diff --git a/docs/codox/Further-reading.html b/docs/codox/Further-reading.html index daa3914..67968f4 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Further-reading.html +++ b/docs/codox/Further-reading.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Generated by Codox
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Further Reading (and watching)
+Generated by Codox
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Further Reading (and watching)
Work by other people which is relevant to what I’m doing, and which I should study.
## Modelling the natural environment
-
diff --git a/docs/codox/Game-engine-integration.html b/docs/codox/Game-engine-integration.html
index 243a2c2..3919841 100644
--- a/docs/codox/Game-engine-integration.html
+++ b/docs/codox/Game-engine-integration.html
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-
Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Game-engine integration (unfinished)
+Generated by Codox
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Game-engine integration (unfinished)
To build a game using these ideas we need a lot of things that are well understood and already implemented: rendering a world, moving models of characters in a world, and so on. This collection of technologies which allow us to realise an interactive realisation of a world is typically called a game engine.
It’s my intention that the bits that I add to the mix should be open source in the hard sense of that phrase, fully free software released under GPL. They cannot therfore be directly linked to a proprietary game engine.
But the current state of play is that the best and easiest to work with game engines are not open source; and while I could build a demo game using, for example, the Godot engine or jMonkeyEngine the result wouldn’t be as compelling and I believe the effort would be more considerable than if I use Unreal Engine, which is my current plan.
diff --git a/docs/codox/Game_Play.html b/docs/codox/Game_Play.html index 5678e3c..9b1c490 100644 --- a/docs/codox/Game_Play.html +++ b/docs/codox/Game_Play.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ -Generated by Codox
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Game Play
+Generated by Codox
The-great-game 0.1.3-SNAPSHOT
Game Play
The principles of game play which I’m looking for are a reaction against all I see as wrong in modern video games. So let’s set out what these are: