Gazz wrote:[...]
That's a lot of brilliant stuff right there... Not sure if you've noticed my post on the first page or not:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3047#p51520
Talvieno wrote:Hmmm... I love this idea, and I think it could be implemented very simply. Very, very simply - and even better, it would hardly subtract from the frame rate. Even better than that, it would have an actual effect on the universe, and introduce some new, if minor, gameplay mechanics. It would help the universe evolve. Best of all, it wouldn't be very difficult for our already overworked Mr. Parnell to implement, when he gets to that point.
Mechanics outline
As a planet's population increases, it demands more materials, but what happens to these materials? Right now, nothing. In the currently-planned future: Also nothing. However, if a percentage of these goods are allocated towards building ferry ships, luxury ships, passenger ships, etc., then you have something very real to do with the stuff your planets receive. I suggest that this is how these civilian ships come into being. The size of these ships would be semi-randomly determined and at least partially based on planetary culture and the planet's population. With this, you can have a planet that prefers large ships, a planet that prefers small ships, etc. You also get planets producing larger ships when they have a larger population.
What the ships do:
They transport exactly what it says they do: civilians and consumer goods, from planet to planet. The most interesting thing, I think, will be the passenger ships. Larger planets may also be able to produce "escort ships" that are automatically assigned as evenly as possible, with larger ships receiving better security details. Planetary culture could factor into this as well.
As to the purpose of the ships:
For each station and planet, you also include a value, ValueX. (Name to be determined. It basically represents civilian happiness: luxury, connections to the outside world, visits from family members, etc.) ValueX slowly degrades over time, with the degradation rate increasing based on the size of the population. When ValueX falls below 67%, your station's productivity begins to decline, starting with 100% productivity at 67% and ending at 0% productivity at 0%. (All arbitrary, changeable values). When ValueX falls below 33%, your population begins to leave (at a slow rate, starting slowly at 33% and increasing the rate of disappearance as it approaches 0%).
To balance this out, you give each planet a "faction" of its own - just the planets, though, and not the stations. These factions are controlled by a very basic AI - no goals, no projects, nothing like that. These factions are given the ships that their planet automatically produces.
The civilian ships and their security escorts are automatically routed towards the nearest location that has the lowest ValueX. In other words, the destination is the lowest (-ValueX% + Distance%). When the civilian ship reaches its destination, the ValueX is raised by a pre-set amount, depending on how large the civilian ship is. Then, it repeats the process and sends it to the nearest (-ValueX% + Distance%). You could also include enemy presence in the calculation, so they don't knowingly send ships towards enemy areas. At any rate, this keeps the planets from naturally having their happiness/ValueX fall too far - only a completely isolated planet, or one with its ships under attack, would really be at risk of growing "unhappy".
NOW: ONE FINAL THING:
Not all ships are sent. A small percentage of them (specifically passenger vessels) are stockpiled, with the combined capacity about equal to the planet's population, give or take planetary culture values. The only reason the planet starts sending them is if ValueX falls below 33%, meaning the population is extremely unhappy. The reason for this is that when you start on orbital bombing, making the population unhappy (I'd suggest orbital bombing push it into a "launch all ships" red zone), you get actual civilian ships fleeing for the stars, filled to the brim with real passengers. It's a real sci-fi style planetary evacuation, and it would be amazing to see - and fun for a sadistic player to shoot down - with some slight moral/gameplay implications.
The visual effect of this (besides planetary evacuations) is that you get civilian traffic on trade lanes, with more civilian traffic around larger planets and stations: They have larger populations, and therefore more civilian ships and faster happiness degradation. Civilian traffic will centralize around larger planets, with rare forays into the dark unknown to seek out that asteroid-based space station you've hidden.
The gameplay effect of this (besides planetary evacuations) is that if you destroy a planet's civilian ships, their population drops, and their happiness (ValueX) decreases. As the value decreases, their productivity drops, and if it falls too far, people start leaving. Protecting these ships could actually be a part of an NPC faction's goals. Destroying them could be a goal, too.
I outlined the mechanics for a system that works very near to exactly the way you described it.
Gazz wrote:"Build a Bar & Grill Module on a space station for +12 morale"
This breaks my system, though. You're both decreasing happiness degradation, and increasing the amount of traffic... In my system, these values are either/or. However... I suppose a potential way to get around it is to make building civilian modules scale the Morale value differently... i.e. make it so that it drops quickly near the upper end of the scale, and more slowly towards the lower end. It feels like a cheap workaround, though. Not sure what to think about it
Also, now I really want space stations with neon signs and adverts so I can see this "night life" stuff you speak of.
Thanks, Gazz.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Collision detection is the bottleneck.
And this bottleneck is independent from ship geometry complexity (most of the time) and also independent from the AI complexity running said ship.
More civilians mean less "slots" free for action making ships.
The slow, dumb existence of your haulers does not make any difference here.
They could as well be full worker AI's with simple tasks
If collision handling is a bottleneck, you're doing it wrong. Collision detection, if done optimally, should have very little effect on the framerate unless you have large masses of ships in a small space. Moreover, the AI ships
ought to be able to avoid collisions by themselves, especially if said collisions severely damage said ships - and this makes collision detection even simpler.
EDIT: Because this has upset some people, let me clarify. This is not directed at Mr. Parnell in any way - he's even said collision handling will be smooth when he optimizes it. It was rather directed at the assumption that collision handling bottlenecks games in general, which is what
I assumed was being said, apparently mistakenly.
Let me fetch it.
He's coded an incredible game completely by himself. I think if a company hired him in the future, it'd probably be the best decision they ever made. 