Antarcticonq

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

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/