OUTLINE
In Thoughts on Worker and Executive NPCs, I originally imagined workers (low-LOD NPCs) and executives (high-LOD NPCs and the player) as being conscious entities whose minds are hosted on an artificial substrate.
Part of my proposal was that workers could be allocated to controlling different systems on a vessel/station or even set in charge of a vessel or station, and that CPU could be allocated to them to improve their performance, as allocating more processing power to a worker allows their consciousness to be simulated at a higher rate, effectively allowing them to "think faster".
Since executives are also digitally mind-uploaded entities, the question arose as to why executives' minded couldn't be accelerated through allocating CPU in the same way as for workers:
I did some handwaving to claim it wasn't possible - but why shouldn't it be? This proposal considers the implementation of a "mind acceleration" mechanic and explains what benefits and other implications this idea has.Cornflakes wrote:when ships have x times the amount of computation, why do i have to use this computation for x employees instead of making myself x times faster?
THEORY
All workers and executives (including the player) are mind-uploaded agents. Their consciousness is hosted within a physical hardware unit that I guess we could call a "brain module" or "mindcore" or something along those lines. mindcores encapsulate all the data associated with a particular agent's consciousness, but require CPU processing power allocated to them by an external computer system in order to simulate the consciousness. The more CPU that is allocated to a mindcore, the faster it simulates the agent's consciousness, but the more heat it generates. There is an upper limit to the heat generation rate of any given mindcore that prohibits faster simulation of an agent even if additional processing power is available - exceeding this would risk damaging the mindcore and thus effectively cause "brain damage" or death to the agent being simulated.
Agents can also allocate additional processing power to their mindcores if they're the commander of the vessel, but this generates excessive heat. When agents "board" a particular vessel and take control of it, their mindcores are kept within a commander support module, which acts as the interface between the agent and the ship's systems and main computer facilities. The CSM of a vessel also provides a certain capacity for excessive heat storage generated by the mindcore, allowing the mindcore to accelerate itself for certain amounts of time with (literal) cooldown periods in between.
As I write in A Reconstruction on Death Mechanic, agents already have their consciousnesses running by default at an accelerated rate of a few hundred times faster relative to us. Let's say that this speedup factor is 500x. What that means is that 1 second to the real-life player would (in terms of lore) be perceived as around 8 minutes for the player character and other agents in Limit Theory. I posit 500x speedup to be the maximum rate at which mindcores can be operated with stable heat levels. "Mind acceleration" is really then temporarily bumping this up to, say, 550x speedup, for a perceived slowdown in the passage of time of 10%.
PROPOSAL
Here are the mechanics I propose for mind acceleration:
- All vessels need to have a commander support module installed. Alternatively, instead of being a separate module, the functions of the CSM could be incorporated into the core module of the vessel, if such a thing exists. The core module would then not only form the core component of a vessel or station, but host the mindcore of the agent.
- Commander support modules come in different sizes and offer different heat storage capacities. Larger commander support modules typically offer higher heat storage capacities. Larger vessels can fit larger CSM's.
- The higher the heat storage capacity of a vessel, the greater the acceleration factor that an agent can achieve for a given amount of time, or the greater the length of time that an agent can sustain a given acceleration fator.
- When an agent accelerates their mind, heat will build up in the CSM over time. When an agent falls back to the default level of 500x speedup, any excess heat stored in the CSM's heatbanks are dissipated over time.
- If a CSM's heatbanks become full, safety measures drop the agent's simulation rate back to the 500x default.
- It may be possible to allow agents to override these safety measures and continue mind acceleration past the maximum safe threshold at the risk that of causing malfunctions such as blackouts or damage to the mindcore.
What benefits does this have to gameplay?
As Cornflakes suggested, flying a battleship should feel a lot different from flying a fighter and the difference between both should be reinforced not just by quantitative differences in the scale of their attributes, but in the actual gameplay involved with handling both. Smaller ships should play like in Freelancer, while larger ships should play like in EVE Online.
I understand this to mean that controlling fighters in LT should be very twitch-based, with little need for complex puzzle-solving thinking and really more just quick reflexes and a good ability to fly and shoot straight. On the other hand, large vessels like battleships should involve less twitch-based reaction skills and more managerial play, where the player focuses more on the following kind of things:
- Locking onto targets and assigning turrets and other weapons to track and fire at them.
- Managing shield frequencies and orienting the vessel to minimise damage being sustained.
- Establishing communication pipelines to other vessels in order to share valuable information with them to boost their combat performance as I've discussed here.
- Controlling the allocation of ship resources to different systems including power, CPU and possibly others such as "repair nanite streams" or coolant. I discuss the need for and implementation of bullet time for players when accessing menus in that thread, and this provides a more concretely developed design for bullet time.
- Importantly, RTS-like control of other vessels within the fleet, including fleet formations and tactics, without the need for a non-diegetic pause mechanic as others (such as Flatfingers) have proposed.
In addition, this mechanic also naturally leads to making the battlefield seem epic, as well as making fighters and other nimble craft appear to fly by slower to an accelerated agent within a battleship, as Josh was concerned about in A Request For Fighters.
How do we display relevant information to the player?
In Limit Theory, I have proposed two allocable ship resources: power and CPU. Josh has previously implemented a boost capacitor mechanic which allows for agents to sustain brief periods of higher power outputs, and the relevant information for this is presented to the player as a blue bar in the lower-right corner of the HUD. I prefer to imagine the mind acceleration mechanic as the CPU analogue of this, and for that reason I imagine the UI representation of the mechanic to be pretty similar. Along with the blue boost capacitor bar, the player will be able to see a red CSM heat level bar:
(Direct link)
The speedup rate relative to the default level can be shown below this bar as well.
Unlike the boost capacitor bar which starts off full and diminishes with use, the CSM heat bar starts off empty and builds up towards its maximum as the player keeps his mind accelerated beyond the default 500x level. When the player relaxes back to the 500x level, the heat bar diminishes back to zero again.
While the player is keeping his mind boosted, special filters and other effects could be used to give the impression of Bullet Time, such as making all sound effects become longer and lower-pitched.
How does the player control mind acceleration?
I imagine that the player could perform configuration of mind acceleration (such as the speedup factor) in a menu before entering into combat. Alteratively, the speedup factor might be a fixed property of the CSM.
I'd imagine that the boost capacitor could be triggered by holding down Shift, and mind acceleration could be triggered by holding down Ctrl.
Is this mechanic compatible with other proposed mechanics?
Yes. This mechanic is compatible with other mechanics that have been proposed. Hyperion's reconstruction idea - that when an executive dies, a certain amount of time (such as subjective weeks or months) elapses while they're being reconstructed - can be made to work with this. At first I didn't see how it could plausibly take weeks or months to recompile what is essentially a computer program (if we assumed that executives are mind-uploaded agents), but this mechanic makes complete sense when we consider that everything in LT is happening at an accelerated factor of 500x anyway. If, say, it took 12 "base" hours to recompile an executive, where a base hour is an hour as it would be experienced by one of us, then that would be the equivalent of 250 subjective days passing within LT for all agents operating at the default 500x speedup rate.
This mechanic is compatible with my ideas in Thoughts on Workers and Executives. In addition, it resolves the issue of worker->executive promotioon as discussed in What Do Workers Do When You Kill Their Queen?, since we are imagining workers and executives to both be mind-uploaded agents and so there is no need to imagine an implausible change in the nature of a worker from a computer program to a flesh-and-blood entity when they are promoted.
This is also compatible with my thoughts in Eugenics (and Evolution).
What are the limitations of this proposal?
The main problems associated with this proposal are:
- People don't generally like to imagine themselves as being computer programs for some odd reason. They'd be happier imagining themselves as being flesh-and-blood.
- A game that utilises such a a mechanic necessarily cannot be multiplayer.
- Ship windows and glass cockpits, as aesthetically pleasing as they might be, would be rendered even more illogical than they'd otherwise already be.
- Some people may not like the idea that utilising bullet time becomes necessary for handling the systems of larger vessels in the heat of battle.