i'm trying to get back into the swing of posting here so i guess that means i should try making some posts
tumblr's ux definitely made it easy to just Write A Post and then post it, whereas dreamwidth/lj has always felt more like committing something important to a permanent record. i wonder how much of that is explicitly that tumblr search is garbage & it's very difficult to search back for posts. dreamwidth stuff being more organized + tags being more useful actually makes it harder to post things. well, maybe
anyway
man 2020 and 2021 have really done a number on me. as i imagine has been the case for a lot of people. those 2-week projects were really working for me, but man my schedule for everything has gotten thrown totally out of whack since then. i guess ultimately there's nothing to do aside from try to get back into things again.
i've been trying to edit + finish more fic stuff lately, which has been moderately successful. it's always like, "oh yeah it's nice to finish things; this is easier to do than coding so maybe i'll try to finish up all my WIPs before i get back into coding; oh wait if i do that i'll literally never get back to coding since i have so many incredibly long WIPs". one of these days i still plan on finishing that gigantic 'gears of war' fic, etc.
anyway i've been playing a bunch of kenshi lately and it has me thinking about systemic simulation. one of the things with kenshi is that it's... well okay it's a 10-years-in-development passion project of a single developer, so it's not so much "finished" as he got burnt out and decided to call what was there 'done'. this shows in a lot of places (supposedly part of the reason there aren't a lot of really radical 'world state' changes is just because... oh yeah each one of those is a huge undertaking that requires completely rebuilding several towns, so i can imagine after you have a few working you're just like, fuck it, this is enough.)
the thing that i keep thinking about is like, the 'mechanical infrastruction' of the game? a lot of things exist and imply systems in play that don't actually exist. settlements will have battery rooms, which are needed to store power for the settlement's various power-consuming buildings (mostly lights and turrets), but if a settlement has a generator it doesn't need fuel; it's always producing power (& you can't, for example, black out a settlement to knock out the turrets by sneaking in and sabotaging the generator or batteries). if you're enslaved, you're prevented from starving, but that's not because you're ever given food; the state of being a slave just hard-caps your hunger minimum at 135 or so. there are mines and farms, and sometimes there are world states that imply that these provide materials and food elsewhere, but NPCs don't actually mine or harvest from farms. which is all fine, really, since i mean... how many games even have that much meaningful interaction? the fact that you can dynamically topple countries in kenshi is already way more than most games do.
but it got me thinking about why that is, and of course the answer is because that's a gigantic economic simulation you'd have to retrofit onto the existing game. whoops now you have to think about all the contingencies for what happens when supply routes fail, or how NPCs react to broken machines, etc etc. you kind of have to start out with AI routines having that much flexibility
and that got me thinking about my game, which... i've been spinning my wheels on that for a while without ever really getting any traction working on it, in part because i've never really made decisions about what kind of game it would be, in terms of specific mechanics. so it continues to be a 'code project' that you can't really do anything in. i've been focusing on like, 'plant growth' because that seemed more tractable than any of the big stuff like 'civilization simulation' but on reflection things are only as complicated as i want to make them. if i want a dead-simple town simulation, i can just say like, 'towns require x daily upkeep to be maintained' 'if there's daily upkeep to be done, a person living in the village goes to the WORK region and does upkeep activity' 'if there's not daily upkeep to be done, a person living in the village goes to REST region'. and obviously that's super boring and would not be particularly exciting to see, but once that interaction is in place you can do things like, okay well maybe let's separate out agricultural upkeep (like farming, cooking, etc) from infrastructural upkeep (like mining or woodcutting or carpentry), or let's add schedules so people work on different things at different hours, or in distinct groups, etc etc. kenshi's highest-level simulation is pretty barebones since it was never systemically fleshed out, when there are all the pieces for it to work sitting around the game world unused. but this seems like a situation where a top-down design would actually work, and you only make the specific pieces like 'blacksmithing' or w/e once that gets meaningfully defined in the simulation scope as a thing people can do.
(i mean the other thing is for my game i really want to foreground how the PC isn't any different than the NPCs, so only having 'in-game actions' once they've been defined on the simulation layer makes a lot of sense)
it always seems to be a little, like, self-aggrandizing to say like "oh and now to simulate a giant rich civilization you can explore and see evolve in-game" but of course in practice that can be as simple as having a big matrix with numbers that get slightly adjusted. none of these game simulations are actually very in-depth in the specifics, it's just once you start describing it as like "vast" "intricate" people tend to make assumptions about how detailed things actually are.
anyway i'm hoping to actually get around to doing that sooner rather than later. it always feels like it takes an enormous amount of effort to do anything for so little payoff, but actually that's only because i so rarely work on things these days. it seems like it takes months accomplish anything but that's b/c it's like, well, i only actually worked on a thing like once in that entire month and the rest of it i just spent feeling sorry for myself
anyway we'll see how things go in the future
tumblr's ux definitely made it easy to just Write A Post and then post it, whereas dreamwidth/lj has always felt more like committing something important to a permanent record. i wonder how much of that is explicitly that tumblr search is garbage & it's very difficult to search back for posts. dreamwidth stuff being more organized + tags being more useful actually makes it harder to post things. well, maybe
anyway
man 2020 and 2021 have really done a number on me. as i imagine has been the case for a lot of people. those 2-week projects were really working for me, but man my schedule for everything has gotten thrown totally out of whack since then. i guess ultimately there's nothing to do aside from try to get back into things again.
i've been trying to edit + finish more fic stuff lately, which has been moderately successful. it's always like, "oh yeah it's nice to finish things; this is easier to do than coding so maybe i'll try to finish up all my WIPs before i get back into coding; oh wait if i do that i'll literally never get back to coding since i have so many incredibly long WIPs". one of these days i still plan on finishing that gigantic 'gears of war' fic, etc.
anyway i've been playing a bunch of kenshi lately and it has me thinking about systemic simulation. one of the things with kenshi is that it's... well okay it's a 10-years-in-development passion project of a single developer, so it's not so much "finished" as he got burnt out and decided to call what was there 'done'. this shows in a lot of places (supposedly part of the reason there aren't a lot of really radical 'world state' changes is just because... oh yeah each one of those is a huge undertaking that requires completely rebuilding several towns, so i can imagine after you have a few working you're just like, fuck it, this is enough.)
the thing that i keep thinking about is like, the 'mechanical infrastruction' of the game? a lot of things exist and imply systems in play that don't actually exist. settlements will have battery rooms, which are needed to store power for the settlement's various power-consuming buildings (mostly lights and turrets), but if a settlement has a generator it doesn't need fuel; it's always producing power (& you can't, for example, black out a settlement to knock out the turrets by sneaking in and sabotaging the generator or batteries). if you're enslaved, you're prevented from starving, but that's not because you're ever given food; the state of being a slave just hard-caps your hunger minimum at 135 or so. there are mines and farms, and sometimes there are world states that imply that these provide materials and food elsewhere, but NPCs don't actually mine or harvest from farms. which is all fine, really, since i mean... how many games even have that much meaningful interaction? the fact that you can dynamically topple countries in kenshi is already way more than most games do.
but it got me thinking about why that is, and of course the answer is because that's a gigantic economic simulation you'd have to retrofit onto the existing game. whoops now you have to think about all the contingencies for what happens when supply routes fail, or how NPCs react to broken machines, etc etc. you kind of have to start out with AI routines having that much flexibility
and that got me thinking about my game, which... i've been spinning my wheels on that for a while without ever really getting any traction working on it, in part because i've never really made decisions about what kind of game it would be, in terms of specific mechanics. so it continues to be a 'code project' that you can't really do anything in. i've been focusing on like, 'plant growth' because that seemed more tractable than any of the big stuff like 'civilization simulation' but on reflection things are only as complicated as i want to make them. if i want a dead-simple town simulation, i can just say like, 'towns require x daily upkeep to be maintained' 'if there's daily upkeep to be done, a person living in the village goes to the WORK region and does upkeep activity' 'if there's not daily upkeep to be done, a person living in the village goes to REST region'. and obviously that's super boring and would not be particularly exciting to see, but once that interaction is in place you can do things like, okay well maybe let's separate out agricultural upkeep (like farming, cooking, etc) from infrastructural upkeep (like mining or woodcutting or carpentry), or let's add schedules so people work on different things at different hours, or in distinct groups, etc etc. kenshi's highest-level simulation is pretty barebones since it was never systemically fleshed out, when there are all the pieces for it to work sitting around the game world unused. but this seems like a situation where a top-down design would actually work, and you only make the specific pieces like 'blacksmithing' or w/e once that gets meaningfully defined in the simulation scope as a thing people can do.
(i mean the other thing is for my game i really want to foreground how the PC isn't any different than the NPCs, so only having 'in-game actions' once they've been defined on the simulation layer makes a lot of sense)
it always seems to be a little, like, self-aggrandizing to say like "oh and now to simulate a giant rich civilization you can explore and see evolve in-game" but of course in practice that can be as simple as having a big matrix with numbers that get slightly adjusted. none of these game simulations are actually very in-depth in the specifics, it's just once you start describing it as like "vast" "intricate" people tend to make assumptions about how detailed things actually are.
anyway i'm hoping to actually get around to doing that sooner rather than later. it always feels like it takes an enormous amount of effort to do anything for so little payoff, but actually that's only because i so rarely work on things these days. it seems like it takes months accomplish anything but that's b/c it's like, well, i only actually worked on a thing like once in that entire month and the rest of it i just spent feeling sorry for myself
anyway we'll see how things go in the future
