Re: [Adam] Friday, May 11, 2018
Posted: Sat May 12, 2018 4:26 pm
Fantastic!
Thanks
Thanks
I don't have a list handy, but it's not a whole lot. One that comes to mind is diplomacy. It's not so much that there's a bunch of core concepts undesigned, but more that the fundamentals are designed and implementation is going to include fleshing out the remaining details. The more I understand Josh's goals and inspirations the less frequently I have to turn around and pepper him with questions.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:23 pmAnd I'm curious: what core design concepts are still TBD?
I expect this will be sooner rather than later. We've been considering during each of the features we've implemented so far and we have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work and we've left 'stubs' in place so there won't be a ton of refactoring once it's working. Still, it makes sense to get this in relatively soon since it's such a fundamental mechanic.
This is Josh town.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:23 pmcompetent generalized task breakdown and delegation by NPCs at multiple levels (tactical, operational, strategic)
I expect this will be part of implementing system generation.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:23 pmLOD AI that's reasonable, performant, and fun operating across hundreds of star systems
This is the primary task we've both been working on for the past month. Our goal right now is to get every core mechanic implemented. Then it's going to be balance and iteration until it's fun and polished and works together. If I were to break down the phases of the development it's maybeFlatfingers wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:23 pmall key features implemented (even if simply) and being balanced for whole-game fun[/list]
This is a good question. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is something Josh wants to support. Currently, no, you can't have both up. However, this is something that would be part of the polish pass. One concern is performance. Ship controls and command both render the system from different points of view. So we'd either have to change that or just expect you to have a beefy machine.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 3:42 amSo i cant have some big local map view (with command and control) open on one screen and my personal flight controls on my main screen?
Or just my inventory controls open in some corner while flying?
Sure. The question being answered was 'how do we know who controls a zone?' Naturally, Josh likes to find elegant solutions with as few moving parts as possible where complex behavior emerges naturally. One simple solution would be 'whoever has the most assets in the system.' But what happens when a large fleet passes through the system while traveling to some other destination? Or when some massive corporation has a contract to mine resources in the system but doesn't exert control?
This worries me now: you're surely not saying that all you're planning up until the polish pass, is to allow *either* navigation *or* engine controls up? Cos that seems unworkable :-pAdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amThis is a good question. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is something Josh wants to support. Currently, no, you can't have both up. However, this is something that would be part of the polish pass. One concern is performance. Ship controls and command both render the system from different points of view. So we'd either have to change that or just expect you to have a beefy machine.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 3:42 amSo i cant have some big local map view (with command and control) open on one screen and my personal flight controls on my main screen?
Or just my inventory controls open in some corner while flying?
I think engine controls would be fine. He's saying there are two "modes" of world rendering: "Main view" and "3d Hologram-style RTS view" - and that you can't render those at the same time. There'll probably be a smaller, less-detailed map view, and having engine controls open, or inventory, or whatever else, will probably be fine. Don't see why it wouldn't be.Ringu wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 12:38 pmThis worries me now: you're surely not saying that all you're planning up until the polish pass, is to allow *either* navigation *or* engine controls up? Cos that seems unworkable :-pAdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amThis is a good question. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is something Josh wants to support. Currently, no, you can't have both up. However, this is something that would be part of the polish pass. One concern is performance. Ship controls and command both render the system from different points of view. So we'd either have to change that or just expect you to have a beefy machine.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 3:42 amSo i cant have some big local map view (with command and control) open on one screen and my personal flight controls on my main screen?
Or just my inventory controls open in some corner while flying?
Having a UI panel independently render the system is fine as long as the 'main screen' is a separate panel too: but not allowing operation of two panels at once (at the absolute minimum) is simply not going to work...
yes, because LT has so far gone completely without iteration and redoing things?AdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amDesign is 85% complete. Infrastructure is 95% complete. Mechanics is where we're working now (maybe 15%?). All the big unknowns and time sinks are in Design and Infrastructure. Mechanics have been super smooth and we're blasting through it because of how thorough the previous two phases were. Iteration is the shortest phase and I expect it to also go smoothly.
value generation/transformation isnt a good indicator of control in my opinion.AdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amSure. The question being answered was 'how do we know who controls a zone?' Naturally, Josh likes to find elegant solutions with as few moving parts as possible where complex behavior emerges naturally. One simple solution would be 'whoever has the most assets in the system.' But what happens when a large fleet passes through the system while traveling to some other destination? Or when some massive corporation has a contract to mine resources in the system but doesn't exert control?
Instead, my thought is that control is determined by the economic value of high level actions made in the system. Control could be stored as a list of factions and an EMA of the value of decisions made that affect the state of system. Value here can be interpreted in many ways: the value of mining is the value of the collected resources, the value of building a station is the cost of the station, the value of destroying a fleet is the cost of the fleet. In terms of storage, this is dead simple, yet we already get some nice behavior out of it. Control is both shared and continuous.
I think shared control is an interesting property. Imagine a system with a valuable resource field and a single colony. The colony has an economy built around that resource field and the colony is in control, right? But what if all those miners working in that field decide to go on strike? They can cripple the economy of the colony overnight. They have some level of control here. What if all those miners work for a single company, a single faction? The CEO of that company now exerts an amount of control over that system. If I want to make a value judgement about who to sell better mining technology to I should be considering both the colony and the company.
The continuous aspect is more obvious. Control should be built up gradually, rather than a switch being flipped at some magical inflection point.
I'm not yet sure if this is the final answer. It's simple in theory, but I have to ensure it's simple in practice as well. Specifically, we need 2 pieces of information for high level actions: principle location and the value of the action. I don't expect any surprises with principle location, but value is another beast. For one, the value is different to each entity. My instinct is that there shouldn't be an absolute frame of reference for value. Maybe every entity needs to be able to make its own value judgement about an action and keep its own data about zone control, or maybe we just pick a reference frame, such as the entity making the decision, and that ends up being close enough.
The first case leads to something interesting: control is relative to the observer. Company A may think they are in control while Company B may think they are in control. Boom, turf wars. If you enter a new system and try to learn who is in control you'll get biased answers based on who you ask. If you haven't visited a system in a long time your control data may no longer be accurate.
If we want to spice things up a bit we can treat control as tradable information. You have to discover who is in control. When you enter a new system you assume it's the nearest colony. And that's right...most of the time. This opens up the possibility of deception. Maybe I keep both a public log and a private log of control. Now we can have 'shadow influencers.' I think Company A is in control of this asteroid field, but the company is just a front for a rival faction. Or when an entity shares control information with me they choose to leave a rival off the list so I won't go trade with them. Or they tell me they are in control when they, in fact, aren't. But if enough entities believe them and their decisions get attributed to the company, the company gains actual control.
Josh and I still have to sit down and talk through how feasible this is, but I think this gets us moving in the right direction.
thats maybe a bit of overthinking... maybe just have generic recursive ownership which can be hidden if desired?
AdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amI don't have a list handy, but it's not a whole lot. One that comes to mind is diplomacy. It's not so much that there's a bunch of core concepts undesigned, but more that the fundamentals are designed and implementation is going to include fleshing out the remaining details. The more I understand Josh's goals and inspirations the less frequently I have to turn around and pepper him with questions.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:23 pmAnd I'm curious: what core design concepts are still TBD?
AdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amIf I were to break down the phases of the development it's maybe
- Design
- Infrastructure
- Mechanics
- Iteration
Design is 85% complete. Infrastructure is 95% complete. Mechanics is where we're working now (maybe 15%?). All the big unknowns and time sinks are in Design and Infrastructure. Mechanics have been super smooth and we're blasting through it because of how thorough the previous two phases were. Iteration is the shortest phase and I expect it to also go smoothly.
AdamByrd wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 11:27 amThe question being answered was 'how do we know who controls a zone?' Naturally, Josh likes to find elegant solutions with as few moving parts as possible where complex behavior emerges naturally. One simple solution would be 'whoever has the most assets in the system.' But what happens when a large fleet passes through the system while traveling to some other destination? Or when some massive corporation has a contract to mine resources in the system but doesn't exert control?
...
The continuous aspect is more obvious. Control should be built up gradually, rather than a switch being flipped at some magical inflection point.
i'd love a separation between defacto and dejure ownership.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 4:19 pmActually, the notion I'm chewing over is that there are actually a couple of ways that control is exerted, and they can interact: de facto, and de jure. De jure ("by law") control is the immediate public claim of ownership, backed by guns and/or local law. If you've got the power, control (of one or more types) takes its maximum value right then.
De facto ownership is the kind that's implicit and that grows gradually over time. If nobody says you can't have it, eventually it becomes yours. So de facto ownership is the kind you'd see in an empty star system, where one faction gradually expands to dominate the whole system.
Then within that sphere of influence there'd be de jure ownership as valuable resource change owners -- the new owners would take possession through some immediate means.
I'm still mulling this over -- it might be too complicated. But maybe it's a starting point.
Great stuff; thanks for sharing it with us!
DeJure/DeFacto split like that Flakes would work.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 6:16 pmi'd love a separation between defacto and dejure ownership.
But i have no solid idea how to actually implement it.
Maybe a "claim" system like paradox games tend to have?
Where you declare your intention to claim a zone and bring forth reasons why you have a claim?
("Im the one actually exploiting this asteroid belt" "it was mine before the pirates came along", "i have a deal with xy for this zone" etc)
Which then would generate ownership points on the strength of the claim.
Not quite sure what you're saying here, but it sounds like you guys have a good handle on it.UI Polish
From what little I can discern, this makes writing up mechanics and mods and whatnot easier by taking out a couple tedious steps to making it all work?Lua Binding Generation
Sounds like your spring cleaning went wellEngine Cleanup
Now that sounds like an excellent camera feature, and will definitely enhance game feel, especially if you can attach some pizzazz to the experience, perhaps a post-processing effect and some of those procedural sounds you were talking about It would be good to see some dynamic info presented through the unit icon of ships you selected, such as a brief flash when you first select them, an indication of a idle ship with no active or standby orders, as well as an indicator of the ship's health and remaining offensive capability. Perhaps the icons of damaged ships blink, the faster they blink, the more damaged they are.Command Interface
Since ships have this habit of moving around constantly I added a button to focus on the current selection. It moves the camera to the center of the objects and zooms to fit them on screen (taking into account their bounding boxes). And for fun I added a way to lock focus so the camera will follow selected objects when they move. It's quite satisfying to select your allies, order them to attack some poor miner, and sit back and watch it play out. It feels almost theatrical with the camera smoothly following the action.
See belowDesign and Next Task
So what you're saying is that bringing on Adam is the best decision you've ever made?JoshParnell wrote:The interesting thing about the dynamic that Adam and I have going on is that I'm really good at finishing90% of the workwhat I perceive to be 90% of the work but is actually more like 50% of the work Adam, on the other hand, is the kind of detail-oriented person who can drive home the last 400% of the work (listen, we have some advanced math going on here in the office, don't bother trying to keep up :V).
So what Adam calls a "fun" day, others might call a "clean up after Josh's spree of finishing-the-first-halves-of-things" day...
The engines of my subconscious are already runningCornflakes_91 wrote:And no info on that?AdamByrd wrote: To that end I did an initial design of how zone control is going to work.
let us theorycraft!
Wait, workers can go on strike if they're unsatisfied with their working conditions/contracts? Workers can naturally and organically unionize? If so, that is perhaps an unprecedented and astonishing aspect of LT if true. I, in all my theorycrafting would never suspect that to occur in LT.AdamByrd wrote:I think shared control is an interesting property. Imagine a system with a valuable resource field and a single colony. The colony has an economy built around that resource field and the colony is in control, right? But what if all those miners working in that field decide to go on strike? They can cripple the economy of the colony overnight. They have some level of control here. What if all those miners work for a single company, a single faction? The CEO of that company now exerts an amount of control over that system. If I want to make a value judgement about who to sell better mining technology to I should be considering both the colony and the company.
I think Flat is right, that control needs to be divided into de facto and de jure, but I'm not convinced that de facto control needs to be a value that invariably increases over time, holding a place for a long time doesn't necessarily mean you have a lot of de facto control at a given moment. Perhaps de jure ownership could be tied to some sort of "Claim token" that varies in size of the sphere of influence from "This is my personal asteroid, keep out" to "I own this whole system" to "I am the rightful heir to the Byrd Empire". Such tokens can also align themselves to higher zones of control or with other zones to form a federation.The continuous aspect is more obvious. Control should be built up gradually, rather than a switch being flipped at some magical inflection point.
How you're going to get NPCs to understand when and where and to whom to lie through omission or otherwise...in a cpu friendly manner... Best of luck!I think Company A is in control of this asteroid field, but the company is just a front for a rival faction. Or when an entity shares control information with me they choose to leave a rival off the list so I won't go trade with them. Or they tell me they are in control when they, in fact, aren't. But if enough entities believe them and their decisions get attributed to the company, the company gains actual control.
I agree, iteration and fiddling with details, especially for polish and graphics is a time-sink tight rope. However Josh should realize the whole point of Beta Testing. In my opinion Josh and Adam should get to where they feel they're about 75-85% done with iteration and polish when they release the beta. I say this because quite frankly, they're too close to the game to see the forest through the trees, and they will need player feedback from the beta testers as to what needs to be changed, added, or removed. Perfectionist Josh might make the perfect UI for Josh, but will that really be the prefect UI for the average player? probably not. And here is where these rapid iteration tools will shine; most games can't just fiddle with their UI at the last minute because that can take a tremendous amount of time and likely fill the game with bugs because they have to change everything manually. Here though, the UI can be significantly transformed in just a few minutes (if you're Josh/Adam tier) to a few hours for the rest of us. In a week, there could be 20 significant tweaks to the UI and nothing, or almost nothing breaks.Flatfingers wrote:I will admit I have some thoughts on just how fast iteration will go, as that is the moment of greatest threat for Perfectionist Josh to burst his chains, declare the quality of numerous individual features unacceptable, and insist on spending time tweaking them to a glossy shine. Of course this is not me saying "Meh, good enough, ship it" -- I know the value of iteration and polish to the play experience of a game. I'm just wondering whether finding that balance point will allow the iterate-and-polish phase to zip by all that quickly before Josh is ready to show LT to alpha or beta testers. He cares deeply about getting things right, and that takes time. But we'll see.
Ahh, that makes more sense. Slow And Tired Ringu (tm) was thinking about how you'd have a choice between 'move' and 'fire' and that would turn it into Final Fantasy, more than Freelancer...Talvieno wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 12:44 pmI think engine controls would be fine. He's saying there are two "modes" of world rendering: "Main view" and "3d Hologram-style RTS view" - and that you can't render those at the same time. There'll probably be a smaller, less-detailed map view, and having engine controls open, or inventory, or whatever else, will probably be fine. Don't see why it wouldn't be.
Yeah the last 20% will take a lot more time than Adam makes it sound. Pareto principle....Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 2:22 pmyes, because LT has so far gone completely without iteration and redoing things?
If it happens over time, problem with fleet passing through is solved. Just a question how long it takes to flip control. I would go with "Assets" in a system, wether its ships or stationary asset. Make them give their owning faction points towards a defined goal for a about 2-8 hours. Who reaches the goal first, will get control after the defined time and afterwards they begin to collect points for control again.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 2:22 pmwhat if the fleet isnt just passing through and there are no forces willing/capable to fight them off?
the fleet jumps in, everyone else retreats because they have no chance.
the control has passed to the fleet, regardless of it just passing through.
that example is more that the defacto ownership is converting into a dejure claimSilverware wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 7:13 pmHave DeJure claims grow over time. If you have been exploiting it for years, then it's yours DeJure.
Can you explain your concern? Having one set of controls out or multiple is simply the difference between dragging out a UI panel or not.
There's a difference between on the fly iteration and a dedicated pass. In the dedicated pass, all the mechanics are implemented, The goal is to ensure they look and feel nice and operate together well. Drastically modifying mechanics or replacing them is not a goal.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 2:22 pmyes, because LT has so far gone completely without iteration and redoing things?
It depends how you measure value. For example, if the military base is in control, then presumably miners have to have some sort of permission or agreement with the base to mine. This means the value of the resources they mine can at least partially be attributed to the base, as the bases decisions allow that value to be generated.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 2:22 pmvalue generation/transformation isnt a good indicator of control in my opinion.
a military base (without maintainance unless josh changed his mind since the last discussion on that) doesnt transform a lot of economic value when its not actively fighting.
but its still very much the biggest fish in the pond when its just surrounded by the mining ops it protects
Maybe. This part is pure speculation. It's tough to say whether this would be interesting or necessary without having a working version of control to test it on top of.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 2:22 pmthats maybe a bit of overthinking... maybe just have generic recursive ownership which can be hidden if desired?
Yes, it's always been this way in theory. Now it just properly organized that way in practice.
This is not a planned feature. It was meant to be a thought experiment to reason about how control should work. Apologies, I'll be a bit more careful with my wording in the future.
Yea, I definitely agree here. I didn't mention it, but if control is information then it would likely be automatically learned when interacting with AI or visiting the colony or could just be bought outright. Something to ensure you can learn without literally flying around to every little spot poking everyone with a stick.Hyperion wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 9:48 pmIn regards to control as tradable information, I like this, but think it would be good if there were regional archives of who owns what, so that you can just do a quick lookup of the archive's known de jure and de facto owners without having to discover every little thing yourself. The archive conducts occasional regional censuses to get updates to their information, but they have to gather the information like anyone else.
Indeed, this is a stretch.