"Tying it all together"

[knotwork]

"Tying it all together" was the motto for knotwork.com and knotwork.net back when I bothered to pay for hosting for them. They can still be found on The Wayback Machine but paying for hosting turned into a monetary loss after the dot-com boom turned into the dot-com bust.

Eventually I will want to post in Help Wanted / Recruiting, but I thought it best to try to write about overall vision before worrying about details of specific bits of internet-duct-tape that "tying it all together" will eventually require.

Long long ago, before the Internet, I wrote "Digitalis D'ydii Cluster" on an Apple IIe then later ported it to Borland's Turbo Pascal as a "door game" for a dial-up BBS (Bulletn Board System). It provided a 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 cube of "cubic parsecs" of space, populated with a spherical super super supercluster of galaxies, of which onlyt the spherical galaxies were actually implemented, all on a single 360k floppy-disk. (The "Onplanet" module providing the terrain and creatures encountered on the planets was a second such floppy-disk.) It did this by using predictable (pseudo-random) number generators that used a 36-byte co-ordinate for "seeds" so as to generate the same things at the same co-ordinates every time.

The problem with that was it did not offer mechanisms for upgrading or downgrading the law-level, population, tech-level, government-type and so on of the planets found in all those billions upon billions upon billions of planets.

Thus when things like Sid Meier's Civilisation came along, I naturally figured aha, I need something like that. So I joined the Athena Widgets based "GNU Civ" project for a few years, until Freeciv came along, which had a better (client and server separate) architecture.

Now Freeciv is well along in development, and I havew a "Galactic Milieu" module for it to allow one to progress beyond Sid's usual end-game, so that going to another planet can become just the start of the spacefaring period of your civilisation's development instead of simply ending the game. Afterall, a lot of work goes into getting a civilisation to that point, it seems wasteful to stop at the very point where you have built a world.

In the long run, the concept is to use the pseudo-random-numbers approach to allow the generation of a missive universe backdrop, but add a database so that if anyone does actually change something so it no longer matches what the randomiser generates the change can be recorded. You'd first look in the database to see if the world already exists there, if not then generate it and maybe not bother long term retaining the generated world since you can always re-generate it until someone actually makes it differ from what the generator started it as.

But Cluster was decades ago, so lets not worry about that part for now. A major point is re-use of components. It seems silly to have an entire application for developing civilisations then throw away those civilisations. Freeciv already exists, it just doesn't include tools for actually walking individual characters around on the worlds that it manages.

Even the Freeciv players who play what they call "long turns", allowing 24 hours per turn, are way too fast though for people who are walking around in the sewers of one of the cities on a Freeciv world hacking and slashing monsters; such MUDs and Nethacks seem to operate at a timescale of more like two real hours equals one game day. Which works out to about one real month equals one game year.

So if Freeciv were used to map the strategic level of what is going on on a world, it would end up being a one freeciv year per real month game of Freeciv. To the current crop of "long turn Freeciv" players that seems insane, but most of them only play on one or maybe two or three worlds at a time. Imagine being in control of many planets. Pretty soon only having one month to tell all your worlds what to do that gameyear might not seem like much time at all.

Plus, Freeciv so totally abstracts the rulers of the civlisations that you are basically playing the intangible spirit of a nation, not any particular ruler at all really. Also, it maybe doesn't make a lot of sense to call a government totally controlled by just one player a democracy, or even a republic.

So we need some kind of feedback from the individual dungeon-crawler scale up to the Freeciv nation scale and back down.

We need to "tie it all together", the kinds of scales used for galactic warfare games, the single planet scale used by Freeciv, probably a tactical squad kind of level like Battle for Wesnoth uses, and indivicual character level such as Crossfire RPG and various 3d RPGs and shooters provide.

To help tie it all together, universal currencies would be useful, though until BitcoIn was invented universal currency used to seem silly. (How can you decide the value of the currency of a planet in a galaxy far far away, especially if blockades of enemies lie between you and any products the people on that planet might have available with which to redeem their currency?)

Bitcoin has been around now long enough that we are even seeing the emergence of Devcoin, spefically intended for financing free open source projects. Like Bitcoin, it is a Peer to Peer currency. You can keep your bitcoins and devcoins on your own computer, trade them with other players without going through any central game-server, thus can take them with you from game to game between authors and hosters and so on, dealing directly player to player with them outside of any game if you wish.

Players who like 3d immersion can have their own OpenASim based or other open source free engine (that Phase thing based on Crystal Space maybe? Whatever) for their own meeting places if they find the cost of such a representation of an environment is within their means, or they can stay more abstract, just a building presumed to ecist in some Freeciv city that is within the ability of a simple 2d engine like Crossfire RPG to manifest for them when they wish to meet in it.

Tying together various approaches and clients and styles of representation to manifest one multiverse in which they all co-exist and interact.

Yes this is a major project, heck it has taken decades just to go from the original Cluster program to the collection of free open source tools that are now available. The Battle for Wesnoth campaigns set on Freeciv worlds of this Galactic Milieu are all un-finished, mostly because the actual Freeciv servers serving these worlds are not currently online so no players of various nationalities have recently told their nations what to do on the Freeciv scale, thus bogging down the Wesnoth scale narratives that currently are waiting to see what did happen next on various worlds so their narratives can be continued without resorting to turning most of the nations over to Freeciv's not so great artificial intelligence routines.

The reason the worlds so far detailed out on Freeciv scale are not online is the simple but core factor in the scaleability of any online game: money. If a game cannot pay for itself it is limited in scale to the amount of hardware and bandwidth it can pay for.

That is the same reason no 3d immersive representations have yet been implemented: they are more expensive than Freeciv representations and Battle for Wesnoth representations and Crossfire RPG representations. Only of players want a certain representation of a world enough to pay for it will it be practical to manifest it for them. If they are too frugal to pay for 3d, maybe 2d might be affordable. If that too costs too much, then maybe simple roleplay narrative in forums will fit their budget.

A number of bits and pieces do already exist, such as Battle for Wesnoth scenarions that are alreay on Battle for Wesnoth's add-ons server and the Galactic Milieu add-on for Freeciv that is made available on their forum and even some web based prototypes that unfortunately are turning out to need more work than had at first been apparent due to there probably being problems with the artwork. (Unfortunately some people putting out what they refer to as open source stuff turn out to use stolen graphics; we need new graphics for O-game-like and Travian-like types of games if we are to be able to make real production use of available code for presenting thosae types of worlds/galaxies within our overall universe/multiverse...)

Well that is probably plenty big enough a wall of text for now. The take-away should hopefully be long the lines of "lets re-use existing free open source components to provide various views of our multiverse appealing to various types and genres of games to put together a large and varied multiverse".

EDIT: Permadeath is a must. I need ageing too if only to make things like DUNE's "spice" (various geriatric concoctions, golden apples, fountain of youth or the like) actually have value.

-MarkM-