1) Can I have an invite? Pleasepleaseplease ***puppy eyes***
2) The topic came up in an email exchange: how can open-ended games (ranging in scale from Ascendancy to The Sims) most accurately represent the scientific process? The normal approach is all kinds of stereotypical - invest enough "science points" whilst wearing a lab coat and magic will happen. A bit of realism would be nice and educational.
A lot of scientific progress has to do with pulling off something unexpected... If it were expected, it would just be done and not progress...
Perhaps, if the 'reality' underlying what's shown on the map could vary, thus producing a different, invisible scientific landscape. (Possibly one that explains how the planet stays cylindrical.) Micromanage your scientific progress by choosing different 'directions' to invest in, and find the tech tree that this creates. (Every new discovery would be given a name in a nonsense language.)
Actually, the implications of a varying tech tree for unit advancement are interesting enough that somebody should probably talk about this on GDL...
There are others, and I'm trying to remind them. Anyway, I'll need your email, Lifewish. Tell me if you're just interested in reading or if you'd like posting rights.
MWchase: that is a very cool idea. You're completely right: the science "landscape" must be opaque to the player, and to maintain that secrecy it must be generated specially for a given game.
I'd suggest two modes of "motion" across this landscape: targeted research and basic research. Targeted research explores the area immediately surrounding an existing discovery, whereas basic research expands the explored area uniformly (or at random). Basic research covers ground slightly faster, but in a very dispersed fashion.
So, for example, if an area of the science landscape has led to new weapons in the past, and if you're at war, you'd focus a lot of your funding on that area. But if you're at peace, and you don't have any pressing economic issues to deal with, you'd put more funding into basic research and watch diverse discoveries gently flow in.
Actually this approach seems to destroy the conventional idea of a tech tree - "dependent" technologies are just those that live on the far side of the "antecedent" tech from where you are now. So in theory your species could invent spacecraft without ever having invented the bow and arrow, if you took a sufficiently convoluted pathway. This seems sane.
The one thing this seems to be missing is the idea of synergy - two discoveries combining to allow a third. Not sure how to implement that.
I might see if I can hack together a sample implementation over Christmas. I suck at games coding, but this will just be a proof-of-concept. Anyone got any more ideas I should try to incorporate?
Just mentioning that I'm getting more active at GDL, again. MWChase and KoF have been at it as well.
6 comments:
Two questions relevant to GDL:
1) Can I have an invite? Pleasepleaseplease ***puppy eyes***
2) The topic came up in an email exchange: how can open-ended games (ranging in scale from Ascendancy to The Sims) most accurately represent the scientific process? The normal approach is all kinds of stereotypical - invest enough "science points" whilst wearing a lab coat and magic will happen. A bit of realism would be nice and educational.
A lot of scientific progress has to do with pulling off something unexpected... If it were expected, it would just be done and not progress...
Perhaps, if the 'reality' underlying what's shown on the map could vary, thus producing a different, invisible scientific landscape. (Possibly one that explains how the planet stays cylindrical.) Micromanage your scientific progress by choosing different 'directions' to invest in, and find the tech tree that this creates. (Every new discovery would be given a name in a nonsense language.)
Actually, the implications of a varying tech tree for unit advancement are interesting enough that somebody should probably talk about this on GDL...
I sure as hell hope BD gives you an invite. It's boring when there's only 3 people.
There are others, and I'm trying to remind them. Anyway, I'll need your email, Lifewish. Tell me if you're just interested in reading or if you'd like posting rights.
I know there are, they just have kinda stopped visiting.
MWchase: that is a very cool idea. You're completely right: the science "landscape" must be opaque to the player, and to maintain that secrecy it must be generated specially for a given game.
I'd suggest two modes of "motion" across this landscape: targeted research and basic research. Targeted research explores the area immediately surrounding an existing discovery, whereas basic research expands the explored area uniformly (or at random). Basic research covers ground slightly faster, but in a very dispersed fashion.
So, for example, if an area of the science landscape has led to new weapons in the past, and if you're at war, you'd focus a lot of your funding on that area. But if you're at peace, and you don't have any pressing economic issues to deal with, you'd put more funding into basic research and watch diverse discoveries gently flow in.
Actually this approach seems to destroy the conventional idea of a tech tree - "dependent" technologies are just those that live on the far side of the "antecedent" tech from where you are now. So in theory your species could invent spacecraft without ever having invented the bow and arrow, if you took a sufficiently convoluted pathway. This seems sane.
The one thing this seems to be missing is the idea of synergy - two discoveries combining to allow a third. Not sure how to implement that.
I might see if I can hack together a sample implementation over Christmas. I suck at games coding, but this will just be a proof-of-concept. Anyone got any more ideas I should try to incorporate?
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