Mythruna

Playing around with global resource dependencies which will ultimately be the high-level goals/planning for the individual NPCs. I've hacked the AI tester to let me place little towns and their various resources so I can connect them together and test ideas. I thought this picture looked kind of cool and I hadn't posted anything in a while.

(http://i.imgur.com/FuXvk.png)

In a way this is kind of like writing a really simple world building game like civ or sim-city.  And maybe it's semi-fun to play with on its own when I get further along.  I'm trying to get it to a point where I might post a release up on the donators section of the forum.

The idea is that towns have a sort of internal set of resource dependencies.  The wood cutter puts hours into the forest to produce raw lumber... but he needs food, shelter, and the occasional tool.  This means that the town has to have food and tools either through imports or by growing/making it locally, and so on.

Mapping these dependencies out (it will be automatic in the real game) allows me to know when they get broken and to have the town reason about what goals it might give its citizens to fix the problem.  For example, if the forest burns down or some griefer clear-cuts it then the town will know it's not meeting its wood quota and can plant more trees and temporarily see about importing the lumber from some other town.

It's the town to town dependencies that will be really interesting.  If some handful of other towns were relying on those wood shipments now they must do without... which maybe means that the shipyard shuts down and no new ships get made or repaired for a while... and so on.

It extends to more than just industry, also.  If I get my way, the whole world will be a balanced mesh of dependencies... including things like the wolves and the little woodland creatures.  So if you clear-cut a large section of the forest then the wolves will go hungry and may raid the town's sheep where otherwise they stay away from the town.  Or if you kill all of the wolves then the forest gets overrun with small mammals, etc. that then start to infest the town's storerooms, chicken coops, etc..

At least that's the theory. :)

Amazing Picture-to-image work there. So I'm guessing the AI is going along smoothly? You should also put a Mine Worker so the blacksmith can make better tools for both the woodsman, and miner. If you ever play the latest Minecraft, you should get a mod called "Minecolony". It has basic AI, and is addicting in my view :)

It looks very much like Tribalwars. Just missing the dirt pit and the iron mine.

I tried the mod out and i do agree with you its addicting.
The AI On there is good, but i bet on Mythruna itll be better.

There will of course be mines and ports and shipyards and fishing and gardens and farms and chicken coops and sheep pens (though mythruna doesn't have sheep but some similar animal)... etc..

I'm just in the early stages trying to work out the math and algorithms necessary to keep track of the whole world this way without requiring a room of computers. :)

Once a civilization gets enough tech to build airships: Awesome. Mid-air fights. Canons, or occasionally seeing an air caravan pass by :D Or being hired to escort caravans would be nice. A major problem though... Since the world will be endless, will you make it so that if a village is far enough away, it will become inactive or slightly active? And kingdoms could have a farther inactivity range?

Actually, that's more or less the whole point of this.

Point 1: when a town is balanced then no calculations need to be done at all.  I can assume that whenever you get near everything is just cruising along.  The game only need to worry about specific amounts of things at that point.  In other words, a town far enough from a player requires zero processing time.

Point 2: when a town is at the edge of the known world, the things it can't get from the known world can be exported/imported "over the horizon" to the towns that haven't been generated yet.

For example, in the process of balancing the town it turns out that it has an excess of lumber that none of the current towns need and that it cannot produce enough iron to meet its own requirements... and none of the existing towns can supply it.  So it sends its wood and receives its iron from some imaginary town that hasn't been generated yet.  When that town is finally generated then it has built in requirements for import+export that it must factor into its own balancing... and if it can't meet the export requirements then it can always import from the next imaginary town over the horizon.

By the time a town is generated to the point of being "resource balanced", the site of the town over the horizon and the road to it have already been decided.

And the benefit is that without that, a town becomes really hard to balance on its own just with known stuff... and the world becomes much more boring anyway because the chances are that towns would never import or export because I'd have to build some other slop into the system.

Point 3: towns don't just operate as a random collection of NPCs working through scripted motions.  This is ok for regular RPGs and it's possible that I could have generated towns that act this way... but what would have been impossible is letting a player create their own town that operated appropriately.  With this system, a player can interject at ANY point in the process.  All the way from helping an NPC rebuild his house after a fire, through running a cargo line, all the way up to creating your own populated town from scratch and managing it to prosperity.  At least that's the idea.

Point 4: NPCs have a built in awareness of how their local world is going.  The NPC knows its role in the town and the role of its "friends".  It has goals, etc. and built in knowledge of the surrounding towns because of trade.

IF (and it's a big "if"), I can find a way to translate this knowledge into non-stupid NPC dialog then we really do have a world where many of the normal RPG style quests can generate themselves.

...and if you do something like release a dragon, it will have a profound and real effect across a huge section of the world.

How about Lamas insted of sheep XD

To the extent possible, I'm trying to come up with semi-unique animals for Mythruna... familiar but different.

It just so happens that I had already come up with an animal that was almost cow-sized but had a wool like coat.  Sort of a cross between a cow and a sheep, I guess.  When I started working out resource mappings, I was pretty happy with myself.  The fact that you can get milk, wool, beef, and leather out of the same animal makes the resource tree much simpler.  :)   Hmmm... if I could just make it have bacon, too....

You can get milk from real sheep, just not very much...
But I like the idea of a sheepcowpig. :P

Heheh.  I just try to make the world more interesting.

I still haven't found anything good to do with horses other than maybe giving them horns or tusks or something.

flyingsheepcowpig please

Now you're being ridiculous.  LOL. :)

fire breathing ice dragon sheep cow pig smurf :]

Who needs horses. I'm a chocobo type of guy.

From an animation+physics perspective, there is a lot to be said for two-legged rideable animals.

Still, there will be four-legged mounts.  In my concept work, the Pantherians tend to ride large animals like rhinos and stuff.  Actually, I want to have kind of a cross between a rhinoceros and a bear for them to ride but all of my concept art to date has been based on classic rhinos.

Ok, a rhino-bear sound pretty awesome.
I just got done watching a ton of voxel game youtube videos and honestly you have the most promising game out there. I am so itching for something to do in mythruna! Im going to go build that airship now.

Thanks.  It's these kinds of comments that keep me going when the road seems endlessly long.

Well I wish you would take the risk, quit your job, and hire some help. This could be your meal ticket. I realized how risky that is and with a family why you wouldn't do it. If "the other game" can make that much money as quickly as it has I would invest in your company/game if I knew you could deliver before someone out coded you due to your time limitations.

All that aside, your doing something great. I hope the walls you run into are never too high to climb.

So yeah.... sell virtual property. I need more for iron island for sure.

Heheh.  I'll see what I can do for that... the more space part.