From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14483 invoked by alias); 6 Oct 2004 02:52:55 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 14474 invoked from network); 6 Oct 2004 02:52:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO s-hertogenbosch.execulink.net) (199.166.6.44) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 6 Oct 2004 02:52:54 -0000 Received: from diamond.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca (ppp591.ac2.56k.execulink.com [209.239.27.81]) by s-hertogenbosch.execulink.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i962qq817567; Tue, 5 Oct 2004 22:52:53 -0400 Received: from localhost (mskala@localhost) by diamond.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca (8.10.2/8.10.2) with ESMTP id i962mRI10064; Tue, 5 Oct 2004 22:48:27 -0400 Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 20:31:00 -0000 From: mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca To: "Eric W. Brown" cc: xconq7@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Antarcticonq In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-SW-Source: 2004/txt/msg01341.txt.bz2 On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Eric W. Brown wrote: > Didn't Matthew Skala mention that the ultimate goal of his Antarctica > work was to create a Lovecraft based module? Yes, though I had in mind more to just mix some Lovecraftian ideas into an exploration-and-conquest game rather than to actually simulate the events described in the literature in precise detail. For instance, I have a list of ideas for advances kicking around that includes "The Delapore menu" - which would increase your food production. Never mind that _The Rats in the Walls_ didn't originally have anything to do with Antarctica. I'm going to have to think hard about playability and scale, though; the rough draft module I have (which doesn't have any Lovecraftian stuff in it yet) suffers a lot from my being unclear on the appropriate time scale. The thing is that activities like building bases and (especially) roads take a long time, weeks to months, but other things like the flight of airplanes take place on a much shorter time scale. It seems like I have to abstract out one or the other. I also had some issues with background economy. I tried to make it so that you could build a network of caches and have them automatically refill from bases, and so that bases in low-productivity areas could be supplied by bases in high-productivity areas by way of a chain of caches in between, but that doesn't seem to actually work. I need a better understanding of why the existing code does what it does, before I'll know whether that's a bug in my design or in the system itself. Playing Wreckreation recently, I noticed that my units seemed to alternate between getting 10 action points and getting only 2, and it's only in the last couple days that I finally figured out that that's due to day and night. I wonder if I might do be able to abuse day/night to deal with different time scales - have a bunch of "fast turns" for things like airplanes, and then the occasional "slow turn" for things like base and road building. I think it's possible to make some units move only by day and others only by night, but I haven't looked into that yet - I got the idea just now while typing this message. -- Matthew Skala mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca Embrace and defend. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/