Monday, September 26, 2016

Sea Trading Game- Distributing seeds, goods

One of the biggest things that I've been struggling with is how to distribute the initial set of skills, and seeds. Historically, plants really only existed in a small area of the world, and were distributed from there to other locations. Domesticated animals were fairly easy to transport, and often moved significantly from place to place. Skills often existed in only a few particular locations, although they often could be spread significantly from place to place. How was I to model this?

What I decided to do is to allow for a number of "seed" locations. The seeds will only exist in certain biomes. The seeds are given to certain cities to start with. There are a number of locations that is specified to create each seed. The seed generation is set to have each city have a good chance of having a seed. Skills work in the exact same way.

I'm still trying to decide how to transfer these seeds from place to place. As it stands right now, the seeds will only exist in a single location, although I'm probably going to allow for seeds to spread to nearby cities, although exactly how close I haven't determined yet.

I also worked on speeding the game up, and was able to fix a few long-standing issues to speed the game up. See the results below.



As of right now, I have one last objective to go until I can start populating goods. That objective is to allow for using multiple input files, to spread out the load a bit easier, allowing me to share XML files between configurations.

Once that happens, I can start mass producing goods! I've been playing a free game called Dwarf Fortress recently, and through it been thinking about how I want to have goods actually work. I've long been wanting to have a huge system of potential goods, and I think I have a better idea of how to make it work after playing DF. Still working out a few details, but it is most certainly coming along!

2 comments:

  1. You could simulate other ships in the world and use those to let skills and seeds spread while also adding competition for the player.
    While that would require you to write an AI, it also make the world feel somewhat more alive and realistic.

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  2. I actually do have a bit of that included, although it isn't particularly fancy, it's mostly hidden from the user. Still, this is something that I intend to do to some degree, how much remains to be determined. Thanks for the input!

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