The comment threads in this blog were getting crazily long, and they’ve always been somewhat constrained by the topic of the blog post, so I’ve finally got round to adding a new forum system! The link is in the header bar. It’s not very pretty yet but it’s functional.
@foggygoofball found it and posted on it before I even knew that it was working!!! So I guess that proves it does indeed work (for two of us, anyway). Also it means there’s already one topic on it, with some questions for you all. It’s open to both paid-up members and free visitors at the moment, but should I make it read-only for visitors? Any thoughts?
Make yourselves at home and post on it as you see fit (just keep in mind that there may eventually be children around). I’ve no idea what the forum can do yet – it was hard enough getting one to play nicely with all the other aspects of what is now quite a complex website – but it seems pretty powerful. I’ve divided it up into a section for biology topics, another for brain-related stuff, and a common room for general chatter. Let me know (in the common room, I guess!) if you have ideas about other sections to add. Ultimately, I’d like it to be structured appropriately for a local natural history society in a cozy English village, but I don’t really have any idea how to cultivate that vibe yet.
Oh, and I added a section where we can post things about how the actual creatures are doing – who has been spotted where, how Sophie’s injured leg is coming along, family trees, etc. That section will be important, but obviously it’s no use at all until we actually have some shared creatures to discuss!
Speaking of which, things are coming along pretty well. It’s been a lot more complex and involved than I thought it would be, but I haven’t come across any showstopper problems. So, hopefully it won’t be too long before I can put up a build that runs with the new village system, which I’m liking more and more.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Wrote an API in the Azure Cloud for managing the whole process.
- A first stab at an algorithm for deciding which creatures go where. It’ll need a lot of tweaking as we see what happens, but it’s a start.
- A way to steadily build up an initial population, until we get some natural births.
- A neural map inside the creatures’ brains that allows them to gradually learn how they feel about each other, and also about each of us, so that they have some say in where they go. This should allow them to build up friends and enemies (both human and phantasian), hopefully help to keep families together, and mix things up over time.
- A way for them to recognize individuals by sight (up to now they could only recognize close family members and socially relevant factors like ‘it’s an older male’). Recognizing individuals wasn’t feasible or even sensible when there were no fixed limits on how many creatures they might meet, but now they’re never going to come across more than 64 individuals in their lifetime, which makes it workable. How many human beings there are isn’t such a problem, since they only meet one user at a time.
- A lot of work rewriting the code that assembles creatures, and also optimizing it so that it can run somewhat asynchronously and doesn’t glitch the system too badly (all of this cloud <–> game stuff has to happen during the pause between the login screen fading out and the world fading in, as well as immediately after you press quit, so it has to happen as quickly as possible). There’s more to do on this yet, because assembling a creature is a very complex process and Unity has some annoying limitations, but it works well enough to be going on with.
- Support for the far slower chemical processes that are now occasionally going to be necessary (longer lifespans, pregnancy, etc.). This slow chemistry can now appear to run in real time, so that things don’t freeze weirdly if a creature spends a lot of time sitting up in the Cloud instead of actively running in people’s worlds. I also improved the chemistry system generally, because everything is calculated in ‘moles per second’, and since a month is 2.4 million seconds, many of the numbers were starting to get really tiny and not very intuitive.
- Added the core chemistry and mechanics of death (the creatures haven’t actually been able to die up until now – they would just grow very weak but then cling on distressingly!). Again, there’s a lot more to do on this later, but we need at least the basics now.
- Reworking the code so that I can continue to develop and debug creatures myself, without messing up all your furry friends and filling the village with genetic freaks. Some of this will also come in handy in the future, I think, but I’ll talk about that later.
Things I have left to do before the next build can happen:
- Fix the damn UI! I think I’ve figured out a way to make walking around work like you’re used to from other (i.e. non-physics-based) games, but without losing the specific features I wanted to keep. I don’t really know if it will work yet, partly because it’s quite a lot of effort, with all those fiddly animations, etc., and partly because for various reasons I had a major meltdown over it and I haven’t been able to face it.
- Change the notebook side of the UI, to fit in with the village concept.
- Do more work on conception, birth, and death, because they’ll be important now and I can’t put them off any longer.
- Fix the many ways in which I’ve probably messed up their chemistry genes when I changed all the numbers.
- Do some things so that creatures can start to choose when and if they appear or disappear in your world (which is separate from the process of downloading and assembling them so that they can appear at all).
- Spend a bit of time thinking about certain new features I’d like to add, now that we have a cloud component that makes them possible and Unity is heading in that direction (more on this another time). I won’t actually add them yet, but I do need to make sure that I’m keeping my options open.
- Start on building (yet another) new terrain, because the present one was predicated on making it as easy as possible to get to anywhere quickly, but the new idea will actually work better by making it larger and more ramified (so that we have to actively hunt for creatures out in the wild). That’s going to be a long process, but I’d like to get it started so that we can at least be aware that a new map is coming to go with the new ideas.
So, I’ve made lots of progress, but I still have some moderate-sized things left to do. While you’re waiting, please do check out the new forums and chat amongst yourselves! There’s probably not much you can talk about yet, but settle in, help me iron out any issues with it, and then we’ll be ready to rock when the next build is done.
Onward and upward!
wpDiscuz
