Sentience

Well if you're interested in a better particles engine... you can download it here (and the full article shortly ;) ):

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=114517

Jotaf98 the screenshot you have put in the last 4-5 posts is very cool, do you have the exe of it I want to play it :)

Thanks :) You can now download it in that thread, but you'll have to compile it to an EXE yourself, sorry :p

as requested, a post in the comms forum.

from our discussion last night:

transferring / stealing map data.

transferring:

select central point and size of radius (might be nice to have a drag type effect (a bit like drawing circles in an art package), but i realise thats cosmetic ;) ) max radius is proportional to tech score

stealing:

central point is randomly selected, radius is proportional to infiltration score

graded comments: insults / compliments.

insults -dipl score, compliments +dipl score
messages can be queued: take average over turn

- is there a point in having insults? perhaps insulting faction A gives you a dipl benefit from faction A's enemies, factions B & C.

Email-type messaging system using Sentiences message boxes as warnings...


blah blah yackety schmackety...

Yep.

Insults would increase your score with their enemies at the cost of you dip score with the insulted faction.

I've still not come up with anything good for diplomacy yet. I'll speak to Claire and see if she can give me an algorithm or something.

When are you coming round for a couple of quick biftas and a chat about Sentience?

Oi! Monkey boy!

Reply to the above post please as I know you're online....

You done any graphics for me you can attach up here. What would be nice would be an 'ok' button similar to that accept button you sent me.

Ta.

blah blah yackerty schmackerty!

:D ;)

I don't know when's best for drinkies. I'll get back to you on it in the next few days.

I'll also give diplomacy a bit of thought too...

I might be able to show up soon for a bit of a chat, but I can't guarantee the drinkies if I'm driving.

Hey Behemoth, I think that your other avatar was better than this one :) (It was from Diablo2, right?)

Actually, I think it was from HoMaM 3.

Hum yeah whatever :)

Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Jotaf... :rolleyes:

Oh, I have that game too (Heroes I, II, III and ALL expansion packs :D ) but when I wanna shorten the name, I just call it Heroes (like everyone does :rolleyes: )

Btw Heroes I was one of my favourite games when I was younger (right after Tyrian and Doom ;) )

Ok, hairy guy, no probs. Just give me a bell anytime to make sure I'm in...

...woolly mammoth...

Yeah that diplomacy's been cabbaging my head, it's making me whimper.

...half a pike right through the jelly...

If you want to come round for a chat this evening then that's cool. I shan't be drinking as I got completely trollied last night.

I got my job btw....

Jotaf - I made this one...It's better cos its mine ;)

We'll see about tonight, perhaps since I've not settled down with a can yet.

Congrats on the job - you did already tell me but well done again.

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Thanks You can now download it in that thread, but you'll have to compile it to an EXE yourself, sorry

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I do not see where ?

Behemoth: :eek: Why don't you draw an avatar like the graphics you're making for Sentience? No offense, but it looks like it was drawn using Paintbrush and then resized :D

DaoK: This thread - http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...766#post639766 :)
That's where I'm writing my article on particles systems. If any of you could help by giving some ideas for effects, or maybe even help coding them... ;)

So you don't like my graphics then...It is hand drawn, but why is that so bad?

I'll give it some work when I get time.

BTW, I use Adobe Photoshop 6.0

Ian,

Stop messing around and work on that bloody great big list I gave you.

Get a move on!!!

Trust me, I'm working on it.

I've developed a new splash screen, amended the logo slightly and designed a new background for the main screen (mainmenu?)

I've also devised a list of wandering monsters and monsterhouses (animated). These are probably about 80% complete. I've also drafted some psuedo-rules concerning them which I'll discuss with you at a later date.

This is as well as colouring the weapons and making you 2 new buttons.

Just wanted to let you know I'm not squandering my time ;)...

MINT!!!

You da man!!!

Well, I'd like to see them (or draft copies), so I can start to include them into the game.

Are you in work today btw, and are you coming round for a chat this evening?

<voice style=evil mad scientist>Patience my pretty. Soon the world will be mine. Hahahahaha!</voice>

*ahem*

yes, and probably. I'll go home first and if I get chance I'll try to wrap up the remaining 20%...We'll see.

Righto.

Once I've got the graphics (even drafts) I can then begin to plug them in.

We really need to thrash out what these things are supposed to be doing and what kind of AI they're going to have. We can set the natives up as a seperate player and come up with some AI models for the monsters.

Got any ideas? My head's cabbaged at the moment...

sort of.

most fauna will amble round aimlessly, some will want to protect their house.

I've got some ideas re: combat which ill share with you later.

Right, the houses should produce monkeys every turn, at a rate dependant on their size. Their size should increase throughout the duration of the game. We may need different graphics to represent their sizes, but that's not a priority.

After a house gets to a certain size it may split up to form two houses (and therefore colonies of monkeys will grow).

We could do with some form of flocking behaviour for the monkeys to stay around the colonies and such. Every now and again, a clump of monkeys might go for a wander around and maybe go and whoop some ass....

Yeah, 'cos we're going to have different types of monsters. Fauna will do fauna like things and monkeys will behave like pop groups.

Cool as!

You don't want to post your ideas about the combat up here?

Still struggling with diplomacy.

Got any ideas?

I cant post the ideas I had because theyre scribbled on a pad a home :p

certain creatures will be solitary types (eg the mountain dwelling hairy thing). Huge and a real threat to isolated units, but fortunately pretty rare.

other creatures will flock as you said.

The ideas I had also revolved around the creatures life cyc... *slap* err...growth rate.

I'm also including balloon fungus - a derivation of Jotaf's H2 trees hehe :D

Diplomacy...
err...
...hummmm...

we'll discuss it tonight. Raid your nearest stationery cupboard today ;)

It shall be done.

Spare some thought for the AI models that these things are going to have. Those floating hydrogen balloons will just drift around aimlessly. Will they move in a 'shoal' or on their own.

Are they produced by the hydrogen trees or do they form the hydrogen trees. Or both?

off the top of my head:

The ballon fungus is indigenous to [name of planet]. The organism proliferates in forested areas an a parasite, growing on the trunks of established trees. As the organism matures, it eventually kills the host tree and establishes itself in its place using a fungoid tree-like construct. This is the juvenile phase of the organisms life cycle. Eventually, buds like tiny bubbles open up all over the fungus. These are its spores and in extreme cases can exceed 40 metres in diameter. When a spore reaches a critical size, it detaches itself from the parent and floats to find a new host. Whilst in its airborne phase, the spore is extremely delicate and potentially explosive. When it finds another tree, its tendrils become attached to the trunk of its host and the balloon shrinks, releasing gas into the local atmosphere. a fungus in this stage is not explosive, but still potentially flammable, and caution must be exercised at all times.

Cool.

So these spores colonise forested areas. Funky. We need to ensure that forest grows at a rate to balance the conversion of hydrogen trees. Do these trees have a shelf life, or will they live forever. If the latter, then planet will eventually become overrun.

How about this.

every turn, there is a tiny chance of a forest fire spontaneously breaking out. the presence of balloon fungus would increase this, and balloon spores would increase it further...

Remember that other weather effects kill forest - ive already done a rotting forest graphic (sorry, I forgot to put this on my list of stuff Ive done).

Another idea. forest stays foreever unless it is
1) burnt down
2) killed
3) parasitised (parasitised forest will therefore have a shelf life)

whaddaya say? this represents enormous ancient forests that are relatively indestructible (renewable source ;)), but still gives us an opportunity to kill off forests as necessary.

Perhaps we can also have the factions developing industrial herbicides (agent orange, anyone?) for strategic purposes.

Behemoth: You got me wrong! What I meant was that your avatar could be at the same level as the graphics you make for Sentience... you didn't spend much time on your other avatar, right? :)

If you make the hydrogen trees like that, there's no reason for them to be made of hydrogen (according to Darwin's theory :p ).

What about if the baloons drifted aimlessly, until they hit something (even a tree), exploding and releasing its spores. The spores only evolve into hydrogen trees if they hit a burned tree (make up something like, they need to absorb the carbon or something :D ), so the effect would be that, after a tree in a large forests was infected, it would start producing baloons and burning and infesting the rest of the forest. It would also expand easily, since when a forest is consumed, the baloons would not explode there; instead they would wander until they infested another forest/tree ;)

What do you think? :)

Thx for the link Jofa

Thx for the link Jofa .

When can we expect a new version ?
I want to review it !!

Icheb

Soon, Icheb, soon....

Huh didn't you read my other reply or something?... :rolleyes:

Icheb: you're welcome ;) And thanks for posting there :)

Behemoth: You might be interested in this, but I'm not sure if it's really talking about you :p

http://communities.msn.com/starcraft...anunitron.msnw

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Originally posted by Jotaf98
Behemoth: You got me wrong! What I meant was that your avatar could be at the same level as the graphics you make for Sentience... you didn't spend much time on your other avatar, right? :)

If you make the hydrogen trees like that, there's no reason for them to be made of hydrogen (according to Darwin's theory :p ).

What about if the baloons drifted aimlessly, until they hit something (even a tree), exploding and releasing its spores. The spores only evolve into hydrogen trees if they hit a burned tree (make up something like, they need to absorb the carbon or something :D ), so the effect would be that, after a tree in a large forests was infected, it would start producing baloons and burning and infesting the rest of the forest. It would also expand easily, since when a forest is consumed, the baloons would not explode there; instead they would wander until they infested another forest/tree ;)

What do you think? :)

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Sounds pretty good Jotaf, it's similar to what Behemoth handed me on a piece of paper a couple of days back.

We've also other little critters to think about like the strange thing that lives in the mountains, sea monsters and other wotsits. We're going to have a wide and varied ecosystem it looks like!!

Yeah, the more the merrier :D

http://www.geocities.com/sentienceuk/diplomacyscale.htm

its by no means finished, but it should (hopefully) give you an idea of what im getting at.

BTW it was a real pain in the arse uploading these files. I hope it was worth it.

Looks good to me, although I think you should reverse the aggressive and passive. Red seems more aggressive then purple to me.

The colours are simply to indicate the variance along the scale. These graphs probably wont be shown in the game, but it gives us a chance in development of building well rounded character profiles.

It might be that one or two of the scales does need flipping end-to-end.

Arbiter, what do you think?

Sorry mate,

I knew I'd be busy today but I'd no idea just how busy!

I'm looking at them now and I'll post back shortly.. :)

Brilliant. That's very good work Ian - I like it.

You've managed to categorise people quite nicely there.

We need to come up with some impacts for each action next to see how this thing is going to play out.

If I build a rocket tower what will that affect?

If I research a tech....

If I attack a building....

Using this, how do we determine is we go to war with someone. I need some mathc/pseudo code.

Well, if he's in a bad mood and been attacked then he'll probably fight, but if he likes them and in a bad mood he'd probably hit them anyway, unless he felt inferior. That's nice, but it's not firm enough for me to code...

Fair enough - it was just a foundation. Now I know you like the idea, we can flesh it out. Are the 3 "sub effects" (I gotta get a new name for that!) sufficient or do they need work?

I envisioned a situation, where each each of the sub effects had a stability threshhold - a score at which they became unstable and therefore warlike. perhaps the score is a fractional chance of war. For example: if one of the scores (for example opinion) was 900 points out of 1000 (arbitrary figure) there would be a 90% chance that the faction would declare war in that turn. This should thus be recalculated every turn.

There should also be a lower threshhold for requesting peace - perhaps 80% of the score at which war was declared. Using the same example, The faction would want to end the war when his opinion fell to 80% of 900 (err...730). This would not be chance based - the faction leader has had time to calm down and is able to make this decision, however it IS based on the opposing factions willingness to back down. Peace would not be declared until both factions had agreed to it.

comments / ideas?

Instead of "sub-effects" (bleurgh!) how about character traits?

hmm...doesnt really communicate what we want...

If a faction has signed a peace treaty with another faction, it is prevented from declaring war on them for 10 years, unless attacked (the other faction must declare war).

Otherwise it'd never end. 73% is still high enough to kick off a scrap!

I think we shoul involve a time based modifier (i.e. all the stats slowly crawl back to the settings set at the start of the game as defined by the players mendset type).

This would ensure that wars don't go on forever between non warlike factions and peace is a tenuous thing with complete nutters...

so be it. Every turn the stats move 10 points back towards their original settings. Or is 10 points too much? Bah! only testing will prove this.

Also, factions have a diplomacy modifier which can be altered depending on the inital value and what techs they research. How is this taken into account.

Could you do some test scenarios for me where one nerk attacks anothers building se we need to see what the net effect of this is.

Try it with a neurotic faction with poor diplomacy attacking an agressive faction in a bad mood, neurotic who used to work in sales attacking a cowards - come up with a few scenarios. Another spreadsheet type thing would be good for that.

Ta dude!

My idea was that the profiles are subject to change throughout a game, based on the current scores in the "sub-effects" thus a faction that should act in a particlar way, might be pacified and persuaded to act differently given a different set of circumstances.

A neurotic faction may develop a successful industry, his faction may grow whilst those around him dwindle. Eventually, his complex becomes a superiority complex and he loses his neuroses. In this circumstance, the faction is still unstable - any change of power/might amongst the factions might send him back to a neurotic profile, but it adds another dimension to the diplomacy.

You didn't answer any of my questions there...

And in response to your post, I don't think a factions mindset should change greatly otherwise they effectively become another faction....

Not true. A factions diplomatic interaction is only one of a number of facets that makes up the faction. Their moods can be weighted at the beginning of the game, but allow for evolution under certain circumstances (these circumstances would not occur every game, so every game should be different).

For example: even a warlike faction is not stupid enough to declare war if they have no troops or artillery. They would become angry but cautious - if diplomatic moves were made to pacify them, they may become calm but cautious until they have sufficient might to recommence their ulterior motives.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arbiter
Also, factions have a diplomacy modifier which can be altered depending on the inital value and what techs they research. How is this taken into account.

Quote:

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we'll have to gauge this as we go on. I suspect the values attributed to a factions actions will be weighted depending on their diplomacy.
eg. building a nuke (0,-40,-10) would have no effect on friendship/opinion (at that point), have a large effect on complex (would intimidate even an ally), and have a small effect on mood (would be less forceful, even towards an ally if you knew he was packing heat!)
if a diplomatic faction (say...x2) were to build a nuke, their effects would be lessened, eg (0, -20, -5)
we'll work on it.

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Could you do some test scenarios for me where one nerk attacks anothers building se we need to see what the net effect of this is.

Quote:

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yeah, I'll look into it when I get a chance.

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Try it with a neurotic faction with poor diplomacy attacking an agressive faction in a bad mood, neurotic who used to work in sales attacking a cowards - come up with a few scenarios. Another spreadsheet type thing would be good for that.
Ta dude! [/B]

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ok, no probs.

Ian.

How is this going to work?

I need maths/pseudo code.

You're doing exactly what I said you would - coming up with nice ideas, but being very vague about them.

PLEASE back it up with pseudo code....

Thanks!

Sorry dude, didn't see your second post - wasn't there when I started typing.

Ok, I hear what you're saying. Seems ok. Wouldn't the status of the relationship also make a difference. Half the deficits maybe?

If you know the dude's your firned, although you're still going to be worried that he's building nukes, you're not going to be bricking it quite so much.

And if this effect is applied every time a war thing is built, then people are going to be at war all the time. What is going to offset the deficits?

If the enemy is naturally cheerful then leaving it a couple of years will offset the nuke as it will slowly crawl back to being a reasonable complex but if they're naturally bonkers then they're just going to kick off at the first war machine being built...

We could really do with discussing this in person. We couldn't last time because I didn't have the spreadsheets and stuff and the time before that my head was cabbaged.

I should be ok this evening for a bit though if you can make it. Not too late as I'm going to the pub with my Dad (if you want to join us).

I shan't be drinking either as I'll be driving.