Sunday, November 10, 2013
Great day (and yes, graphics Josh remained happily locked in his cage )!!
I spent a lot of time thinking about currency and how the game's going to handle universal currency. The problem is: how do AI players make money in an unestablished system? Where does the money come from? My current solution is to simply have a very "thin" currency - one that is basically an alias for the most plentiful natural resource in the given universe. Although it's slightly "gamey," I allow the resource to be freely converted into credits when docked at a station, as though there were some trans-universal bank to which all stations have access. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to let the player have this ability (probably so), but that's what the AI does. I'm also not sure yet if I will allow the reverse direction - although technically it makes the currency moot if I don't. Ultimately, there are going to need to be some "gamey" choices made here to avoid the "real" solution - which is to have local/regional currencies in play (managed and backed by specific factions), exchange rates, etc. That would be the realistic solution, but I'm just not ready to add that level of complexity. It's one of those features where I don't see how to add depth and not sacrifice simplicity.
I'm working on figuring out how I want to "seed" the universe with life. It's definitely an interesting and challenging question to figure out exactly how to set up the beginning of the game. I'm thinking of setting up a very small "seed outpost" in regions that are populated, and loading a few pieces of junky equipment onto this outpost so that the AI can get started. "Ancient construction module," for example Alternatively, "alien construction module" - as though all life in the universe were seeded by mysterious aliens
NPCs now have personality traits that are distributed in an interesting way. The traits are generated much in the same way as resource distributions across systems, and I'm thinking it would be neat to inject some coherence and patterns in the same way that I do with resource distribution. That way, you might find regions where people are just naturally intellectual, for example, and have researched a lot of advanced technology. Similarly, you might stumble upon regions where the locals are highly-aggressive - stations are littered with weapons for sale and systems are littered with the corpses of ships. I also started working on tying personality traits into decision making
As for hypothetical items and research...I scrapped the idea! My new stance on the issue: when you're thinking about building something that doesn't exist yet, you don't necessarily envision it in a detailed, final form. The important thing is that you envision what it does for you. If an NPC decides that it wants to amass more construction power, but doesn't know of an existing construction module item, then it will simply pursue research of construction modules directly, rather than introducing the intermediate step of dreaming up some hypothetical item. This is both technically simpler and conceptually clearer
I envision a lot of time this week being spent in the console version of LT...time for lots of gameplay/simulation work, and...no graphics!
[ You can visit devtime.ltheory.com for more detailed information on today's work. ]
Post
Mon Nov 11, 2013 10:02 am
#1
Week of November 10, 2013
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford