67 replies to this topic

[Mythos_Ruler]

Alright. This is very very helpful. Perhaps we will have an updated Celt "temple" for Alpha V. We've always had trouble with the Celt temple. Initially we were going to make it a stand of trees (which is kind of silly to "construct"), then we made it a stone henge, which is 2000 years out of date.

[SMST]

Mythos_Ruler, on 17 April 2011 - 04:29 PM, said:

Alright. This is very very helpful. Perhaps we will have an updated Celt "temple" for Alpha V. We've always had trouble with the Celt temple. Initially we were going to make it a stand of trees (which is kind of silly to "construct"), then we made it a stone henge, which is 2000 years out of date.

I really hope you keep the Stonehenge for editor purpose, though.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Of course. It's very nice.

[ichthys]

I would like to see a living nature, which depends on the different animals and the player. For example in one map there are wolfand deers (I hope, that's the correct word). The wolfes hunts the deers, because the need them to live and ensures this way, that there are not to much of it. If the player exterminates the wolfes, he maybe cold have the problem, that there are later to much deers. And if he exterminates the deers, than would be his problem, that there are more wolfes who attacks the humans.

And of course, not only regenerating fauna please. I have the same problem like the others with the forests. It's really ugly if there is no forest anymore. I suggest, that there are areas where trees aren't able to grow. For example every building has an aera where new trees can't grow, the streets and all places whith much movement.

And different seasons which influences the animal's behavior. For example a lot of deers dies in the winter and wolfes attacks humans.

This is only an example how it could be. It could be like in Gothic/Gothic 2, where are many different animals which have their own behavior and "food".

[satchitb]

That predator-prey cycle is wrong. Having a larger number of deer means more food for the wolves, whose population grows. Killing off deer would mean fewer wolves, as they would starve. Killing off wolves, OTOH, would mean more deer, whose population thrives in the absence of a predator. IRL, that would mean overgrazing, where a burgeoning deer population would eat more grass than is good for the ecosystem, but that would be a little too complicated for this game. Your "living nature" might work, but only up to two trophic levels in the food web.

[oshron]

well theres already some programming, iirc, where a polar bear will occasionally attack a seal that it finds lying around somewhere. the same could probably be done for wolves, lions, and so on

[feneur]

oshron, on 25 April 2011 - 04:42 PM, said:

well theres already some programming, iirc, where a polar bear will occasionally attack a seal that it finds lying around somewhere. the same could probably be done for wolves, lions, and so on

It's not programmed, but it's in the Design Document.

[Macgruber]

What size are the planned maps? I'd like to think that we could use larger maps, as other games leave you fighting with massive city-states in what feels like your backyard. The scale feels completely inappropriate.


Other than that, how long until ships have swaying/ sail animations?

[ichthys]

satchitb, on 25 April 2011 - 10:51 AM, said:

That predator-prey cycle is wrong. Having a larger number of deer means more food for the wolves, whose population grows. Killing off deer would mean fewer wolves, as they would starve. Killing off wolves, OTOH, would mean more deer, whose population thrives in the absence of a predator. IRL, that would mean overgrazing, where a burgeoning deer population would eat more grass than is good for the ecosystem, but that would be a little too complicated for this game. Your "living nature" might work, but only up to two trophic levels in the food web.

Yes, if there where no limits, then you are rigt. Because I don¨t think that we want 1000 deers or more on the map.
But I think, with some limits it would be nice.

[Alpha of the Eagles]

SMST, on 17 April 2011 - 04:37 PM, said:

I really hope you keep the Stonehenge for editor purpose, though.

Could we use it like the shrines in Age of Empires I?

[Aquila]

I see that someone already pointed out a problem with resources. In my opinion people gather resources too fast. In my last game villagers cut all trees near village in less than an hour. That makes gameplay (without replenishing resources) rather short-centered. I myself fing playing a desert map (when all trees have been cut, all stone and metal mined etc) totally boring and, as someone said before, it's not about resource availability through market. It about playing a game with no trees at all - a catastrophe.

So, if replenishing resources cannot be implemented, maybe you should increase "resource" amount in trees/stones? If, for example, tree "has" 200 wood in it, maybe we should increase this number to 2000? Or even 5000? So, during gameplay, only few trees would be cut in an hour? 



And will there be any "Wonder" buildings - like in AoE II?

[oshron]

i think 500 would be a good amount. that was about as many as in Empire Earth and Age of Mythology, and those trees could last for a good long while.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Gathered the trees in an hour? How long do you want games to last? and it doesn't make any realistic sense that 1 tree would have enough wood for 10 houses.

[Aquila]

Well, maybe there's better way to satisfy all. Can you make a file (preferably a txt or xml file that could be edited with notepad) that would contain number responsible for all resources in the game? So if someone would like to have 500 "wood" in a tree - he would only change the value to 500. If 2000 - change to 2000. Is it possible to do?

[fcxSanya]

Aquila, on 07 May 2011 - 08:45 PM, said:

Well, maybe there's better way to satisfy all. Can you make a file (preferably a txt or xml file that could be edited with notepad) that would contain number responsible for all resources in the game? So if someone would like to have 500 "wood" in a tree - he would only change the value to 500. If 2000 - change to 2000. Is it possible to do?

This is already implemented, you can find these values in the simulation templates. Look for example to template_gaia_flora_tree.xml:

13 	  <ResourceSupply>
14 	    <KillBeforeGather>false</KillBeforeGather>
15 	    <Amount>150</Amount>
16 	    <Type>wood.tree</Type>
17 	  </ResourceSupply>

[Aquila]

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Gathered the trees in an hour? How long do you want games to last?

I sometimes like to play a game for few hours. Slowly developing my village/city, defending only, and after fun from having a huge and wealthy city disappear - finish off the enemy.

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This is already implemented

Great! Thanks!

[Sebovzeoueb]

I think renewable resources would be great. Trees should grow near other trees, I reckon. And animals should spawn in the appropriate type of terrain (deer in the forest for example). I'm sure I have played a game like this before. This system encourages you to leave some forest, so that it will grow back and the appropriate wildlife will spawn there.

I really like the idea that you could play forever, rather than harvesting everything on the entire map and then having nothing. But only if you make an effort to avoid deforesting everything.

Maybe eventually implement a high level tech where you can dig out quarries to get more stone and mines for metal. I don't remember which game it was, but I remember one where you would mine a resource, and it would run out, but then you could mine deeper and get more of the resource. I may be thinking of Anno 1602.

I also like the idea of being able to generate metal through trade.

Right this instant I have just had a thought, what if you could kill certain animals and sell their pelt for metal? I find the thing with the way this game (and AoE style games) works is that you initially kill a few animals and gather some berries, then you build some farms and for the rest of the game they serve no purpose. It could be interesting to bring some sort of greater use for animals into the game.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I doubt we'll have replanting trees and such (for one thing this would complicate pathfinding; maybe Philip will contradict me). I could imagine us having spawning animals though. Seems easy enough: Respawn rate x number of existing animals. If all the animals are poached, then no more spawning. Could even make the number of predators as a ratio to the number of passive or skittish (prey) animals.

[gudo]

Hmmm.... You would also want your animal spawning rate equation to take into account the carrying capacity of the map (the max number of animals the map can support) otherwise, you may end up with a map choked to death with animals. (medium sized map can totally support 2^256 deer.) Not only is it unrealistic, it would also cause our game performance to degrade over time. If I can find some old notebooks of mine, I can write up some nifty equations for rate of population growth with the following properties.

If the population is ever above the carrying capacity, the population starves till it falls below capacity. (eg, what happens to the lions when people kill half the deer population.)
The population grows fastest when it is far below capacity (more resources per member of the population) and slowest when it nears capacity (fewer resources per population)
*optional* When the population falls below some critical value, there are no longer enough members to restore the population, it will eventually go extinct.

Determining the carrying capacity at any give time would be easy enough I think. For herbivores, we just take the grazing area and multiply it by some constant (1 acre can support 10 deer. If we have 30 acres, our carrying capacity is 300 deer.) Thus when a player builds buildings, he decreases space and lowers carry capacity. Carrying capacity for predators would be easy too, just relate it to the number of prey items avaliable. So when the prey population decreases, the predator population will fall till there are enough prey to support it.

With four equation\s, I think we could make a very lifelike predator/prey model emerge in the game.

Edited by gudo, 02 June 2011 - 06:01 PM.

[Ykkrosh]

Hmm, is managing wildlife population levels a fun activity for players to engage in? I'd expect any equations would devolve into some trivial guidelines ("always hunt everything except for 5 deer then wait 30 minutes and repeat") that players would look up in a guide, and then the gameplay would consist of panning over the map and counting animals, which sounds pretty tedious to me and would distract the player from the main focus of the game (managing their economy and military). It could be a good component of an ecology simulation game, but we're making an RTS game, and I don't see how a mixture of the two could really work.

(Incidentally I happened to see some documentary recently which rubbished the idea of modelling ecosystems as mathematically stable systems, since they're actually not stable at all - they're constantly changing, and after a sudden disruption they don't return to their original state. I think the programme may have made some potentially dubious claims, but it sounded convincing that stable systems were an inaccurate oversimplification of real life, so it probably wouldn't be "very lifelike" )

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I doubt we'll have replanting trees and such (for one thing this would complicate pathfinding; maybe Philip will contradict me)

I will - the game already has to handle newly-created obstructions (e.g. buildings), and dynamic changes to forests (e.g. cutting down trees), so dynamically creating forests probably shouldn't introduce any problems that we don't already have to solve. I guess the trickiest parts of spawning new trees or animals is picking precisely where to put them, and not making it look stupid and confusing by having them suddenly pop into existence for no observable reason.