67 replies to this topic

[gudo]

Ykkrosh, on 03 June 2011 - 01:56 PM, said:

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" )

Heh, don't tell my old bosses about that documentary I used to do a bit of population modeling for USA Dept. of Natural Resources relating to sustainable harvests and a tiny bit for some pharma corp. (populations of bacterium vs human cells. Actually very complex because there's hundreds of types of bacteria all competing for a slice of the pie, plus other factors.) In both cases, I was looking at the effects of big disturbances (for DNR, it was clear cutting, for pharma, it was the introduction of antibiotics.) But I digress.

I really doubt that players would take a keen interest in managing population levels. There's simply too much other stuff to do, you can't track all the animals, you can't control what the other players will do with the animals and it just plain old sounds boring. I think they'd all adopt a animal management policy like "Just leave a few deer, and they'll come back." IMO, the actual game is too engaging to devolve into a park sim.

Anyways, I got home and I looked at my notebooks and I realized that I was thinking far, far, far too complex. (population thresholds, competing species, varied resource utilization, etc.) Like you said, it's an RTS, not an ecology sim ;P The most basic of population models would work great in this game.

Rate of growth = k(Pop)(1-Pop/Cap)
Pop is the current population. Cap is the carrying capacity of the map, and k is an arbitrary constant used to fine tune the rate of growth.

As you can see, when the population ever exceeds the carrying capacity, that second term becomes negative, so we naturally lose some population. Unlike a a more basic equation (say, "population grows by 25%") this means we effectively put a bound on the population. We'll never wind up with 2^256 deer even if we don't hunt for days. Also, the further we are capacity, the faster our population grows.

How do we determine our carrying capacity? I was originally thinking we could have it be some function relating to the amount of grazing space, but that's just overkill now that I think about it. It would be better to just flat out define it. ("For large maps, the max deer population is 50. The max elephant population is 10.") For predators though, I think it would be cool if we defined carrying capacity as a function relating to the amount of prey items. ("The carrying capacity of lions is one fourth the current deer population.") Assuming lions ever get AI enough to naturally attack deer, then that right there is all we would need to establish a very realistic predator-prey relationship model.

As for where you'd spawn animals, why not have them spawn exactly on top of existing members of their own race, then walk away?

Edited by gudo, 03 June 2011 - 03:34 PM.

[chaosislife]

Renewable resources for trees and critters sounds about right, i remember expecting AoM to do that when i first started playing it. I'd just leave a few deer in a nice wooded area, wall them off and hope they'd breed. What you could do is just set the gaia ai that controls all the animals and trees to build new animals and trees from the ones on the map, give them a longish build rate and only build one at a time. Next thing you know the areas you aren't currently gathering from get loaded with wildlife. I like this idea better than watching the enemy run out of resources and sit there waiting for me to kill them. I play to play not to win. As for the other resources such as stone and metal, metal could be generated thru some sort of factory, workhouse, or trade function. Stone and wood and even metal you could get more of by recycling buildings. Set it up so that when a building is destroyed either manually or thru war rubble takes it's place like in aom. But make the rubble a gatherable resource representing like 75-90% of the buildings required materials. This also means that if you get done with a building and want to build something else in it's place you can do so without it being totally wasted.

[Alpha of the Eagles]

I think the keyword for replenishment of trees and animals should be slowly.

[chaosislife]

yes, slowly is good, but if we went a tad more complicated we could also set it up so new trees and critters can't spawn in any players LOS. Then we wouldn't be able to actually see the new resources appear, we'd have to discover them.

[Rasunadon]

chaosislife, on 06 June 2011 - 09:14 PM, said:

we could also set it up so new trees and critters can't spawn in any players LOS

And what about situation where you have your outposts around the whole world so you see whole map? No spawning?

[chaosislife]

If you have that much coverage you're playing by yourself having already shot down every single enemy unit that spawns. But yes, no spawning in fully revealed maps. Tho another way might be to use some sort of growth animation like the gaia forest trees in AOM, or to spawn a sapling model which then transforms into a more grown up model over time. The transform function should be able to handle that.

[Rasunadon]

You don't have to be alone - there could be four players still at war, each one fully seeing his quarter of map.

[Sebovzeoueb]

chaosislife, on 07 June 2011 - 03:39 AM, said:

Tho another way might be to use some sort of growth animation like the gaia forest trees in AOM, or to spawn a sapling model which then transforms into a more grown up model over time.

+1