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Modeling
I almost forgot about AI characters
In my (still-being-written) Sundog novel, the ship itself is sentient. As the novel explains here: Interestingly, the same technology that gave humanity hyperdrive also made artificial intelligence – always close, always elusive – actually possible. It turned out that intelligence of any form was a sub-dimensional quantum effect as well. But – singularity proponents notwithstanding – […]
Modeling characters (pt 2)
(Part 1 is here.) Frasgird will include both true non-player characters (NPCs) as well as characters working for the player (PCs), either under the player’s control or — if multiplayer implementation happens — under control of another cooperating player. I haven’t fleshed out completely what their exact roles will be, but here are some ideas. […]
Modeling birth rate
Here’s an interesting question: how fast will Frasgird grow due to both birth rate and immigration? It strikes me that — absent both enabling technology and some sort of incentives — birth rate per se is going to be pretty low, perhaps at the rate of 5 live births per thousand women per year (which […]
Frasgird dashboard / coding update
As mentioned, I have started doing some coding in order to prototype the actual game design and underlying models of Frasgird. I’m going this in NetBeans (and writing in Java). Here’s what the dashboard looks like as of this afternoon (you can click on it for a clearer, larger view): The colony map is the […]
Old design notes
I am transcribing here entries from two notebooks: “Collected Algorithms (& Other Notes)” started 21 May 1981 “Ideas & Thoughts / NOTES” started 17 Dec 1981 I only have a few entries from the first one, which really does have mostly algorithms, either in pseudo-code or implemented in some specific language (anyone need a binary […]
Modeling and presenting rings
I mentioned in an earlier post the concept of the rings around the core colony being concentric circles. However, I am currently doing some prototyping in Java of the colony modeling code and have been looking at a simpler approach. One involves using 2×1 rectangles forming concentric square rings around the colony core. Here’s what I drew […]
Modeling developments
I actually started writing code last night, sitting in Terminal A at SFO Airport, waiting to fly home. This is just exploratory, prototype code, intended to make me think about how to model all this stuff. In this code, I defined the class Colony, which is meant to represent Frisgard itself, but of course can […]
Modeling systems
I spent some time the other afternoon jotting down thoughts on models for systems, planets, and regions. Of course, I almost immediately got sucked down into the vortex of star system generation. This was actually a keen interest of mine for many years back in the late 1970s and through the 1980s (one of my first articles […]
Modeling economics (first of many parts)
In Sundog (the game), there were 30 types of cargo that could be transported by the pod (and thus by the ship), plus nothing and cryogens (the ‘green ice’ pods) — 32 types in all (because, binary). Each had an associated base price. Here’s the data from the original game, with the base price for each […]
Modeling characters
I have a number of thoughts about how to model characters (individual sapients) in Frasgird; I’ll try to capture some of them here. First, as much as possible, I would like the character ‘model’ (attributes, status, available choices, other info) to be consistent across all races of sapients and across the player, all major non-player […]