Tag Archives: Earth 3045

Licensing Woes and “I don’t need Open Source”

Posted by santosj on December 15, 2006 3 comments

*Updated* I rewrote most parts for clarity.

Sigh.

I had a recent discussion about using Astrum Futura for Battle Machines and Earth 3045 with the lead developers of the projects. It did not turn out as I had expected. Really it boils down to that the original developers don’t want to have their product open source and available for free download. It isn’t in my power to persuade the developer of Robotechnik (aka Battle Machines) to switch over to open source. The lead developer already has a team of developers for it, so there isn’t anything right now that I can offer.

The conclusion of both conversations was mostly what is in the title, “I don’t need Open Source.” I won’t be able to change their minds, so for now I would have to remove both games from the planned rewrite over to the Astrum Futura engine. My priorities for next year will be changed because of this.

I am perfectly fine with writing open source software and content with working on the Quantum Game Library and Astrum Futura. Both projects are actually something that I enjoy.

Earth 3045

The plan for Earth 3045 has always been to salvage the parts that are usable and scrap everything else. Mostly the only things that will remain are the general ideas of the game. I also had planned on adding my own ideas in the mix to make it a little bit more unique. There is a reason for changing the gameplay and I will get into that.

When I was told of the idea, I was excited because I had never heard of such an idea. I should have done my research, because a game exists similar to the design of the game. Earth 3045 even has a similar name. I wasn’t happy, but I had already set motions into what Earth 3045 could become and decided not to end the project.

The general basis that you are a member of society and work in that society will stay. I had already developed a prototype for job based game play and thought I could put it to use in this game. I still plan to do that and add some AI in the mix to allow people to decide how well the player is doing.

One of the primary reasons for using Astrum Futura for this project is the navigation and mapping that Pádraic Brady is coding. The thought of doing all of this myself probably would have set the game back a year or so from other coding priorities. The Quantum Game Library will also have components that will make coding games easier. Perhaps the hardest part is the math and already the QGL is strong in that field (for the mapping).

The reason for allowing the coder to continue is to allow him to learn how to program so that he would be able to help once the new system is up and running. I think he will be okay with the changes if the game is better than what he currently has finished. It would also be good to move him away from the Gamer’s Fusion style of coding to a better separation of business logic and presentation layer.

The current engine for Battle Machines and Earth 3045 would require you to rewrite the page, including the HTML to add a new feature. Everything is bunched together and I often worry about security, because I doubt any filtering is done in Earth 3045. The legality of Robowarz (the game built off Gamer’s Fusion) is murky, since technically it should of had its source open and downloadable. The history is also kind of vague but the copyright was all but removed from all pages, except one. This kind of mistake, whether intentional or not will not be repeated.

The lead coder says that all of Earth 3045 is his, but I can tell that it has similar file names to Robowarz, which technically holds the GPL license of Gamer’s Fusion. I would rather be sure that the game is legal and use something else. The Astrum Futura engine would be a good candidate since it has most features that I want. It would also be quicker to add new features, which is one of the leads reasons for not open sourcing.

I’m pretty sure that when the lead sees the final product of Astrum Futura, he will want to use it.

Battle Machines

I may end up losing Battle Machines. Honestly, I would hate to see it go. There can be no compromise, either the lead wants to use Astrum Futura or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then no big deal, I’ll still support Battle Machines, since it is a good game. I would rather it move from its current coding style to something a little bit more maintainable.

The Battle Machines is a good game and could become more popular than it is now if it had the right set of features for it. I would have liked to worked on it to give it that push to where it is fun and has better features. However, I don’t want to work with the current code base and had plan on rewriting it.

The idea of making a closed sourced library to use with Astrum Futura would violate the GPL and wouldn’t be workable. I do plan on writing my own code that allows for similar features of Battle Machines, but in doing so, I may break Robotechnik away from Battle Machines. If that happens then there would be two similar games, but like Earth 3045, I hope the lead sees how much better Astrum Futura engine will be over the current one.

The owner has the option of moving or removing it from Absidon. Most of the Absidon support for it is domain and hosting, which costs next to nothing. The owner already has a group of developers which help on the source, so he doesn’t need the help of the Astrum Futura developers or mine. The decision and option is up to the owner of Robotechnik.

Money Model

The developers think that they can make a game and people will want to pay for it. Doesn’t really work that way. The games that do make money had a lot of work put into it, more than the short development cycles that the Absidon games have had.

The license of Astrum Futura does not allow for admins to accept donations for rewards. An admin can accept donations, yes, but it can’t have any reward for the player doing so. Both games give rewards for donations, which I don’t agree with anyway, because the rewards aren’t worth the payment. I thought of removing that anyway.

Using Astrum Futura will remove any thought of extended premium features, but any modifications to the source has to go back to the repository unless it is a plugin. Any plugin has to be available free and open for people to use it. I think it is a better model that way, since other developers are bound to create really neat and awesome plugins later.

Their hope is that the work will eventually pay off and piles of money would flow in. I haven’t really the heart to tell them that this dream wouldn’t come to past until they really offered something in return. Popular games are popular because they are fun first. The whole concept of making a game to make money first doesn’t really suit well on the online browser world. If you have an excellent product consisting of 10 developer and a million dollar budget then you might be able to come away with some money.

In the Future Perhaps?

I just left it at when Astrum Futura is finished, that hopefully it will kick so much more ass off of the current feature set that Earth 3045 and Robotechnik has, that they would agree to sell their souls to touch upon the greatness that is Astrum Futura.

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Sim Personality

Posted by santosj on December 29, 2005 Comments Off

It is going to take a lot of fields to make the Sim intelligent and store each generation of the intelligence (for logging and improving the AI). There has to be a section for personalities that are static, that tell what the sim will eventually be like and chances of doing. Things like criminals, if the criminal was captured and how dangerous the criminal is. The fields should be in the same table for all of the traits and personalities. This will simpify things and keep the amount of queries down.

There will also be other traits, like age, gender, strength, health, and others. The traits will determine “mating” between sims, as well as the other parts of the personality. The personality fields and traits will grow over time and when new controls or features are put in and implemented.

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AI: Death, Birth, and Traveling

Posted by santosj on December 28, 2005 2 comments

I was thinking and I thought about it the AI death and birth method. A problem came up that kept bugging me, which is that since there is a max population, the birth would have to wait on the deaths and traveling. The other problem was that the birth and death would be based on the country and there would still need to be max population birthed. I was thinking of doing each of the players countries, but I think it would be better with this other approach.

The choices of the population will be based on fuzzy logic and the birth and death will be based on generic AI. The choices will be based off of Neural Networks AI in the future. The child birth will have to use generic AI since it will inherit the characteristics from the two “parents.” The popularity may also use Generic AI, depending on how well the simple approach works.

Note: I may make note of the number 5 in the sections in reference to the minimum limit of population. This is no way what will be decided when the game is finished. It could be 10, 20, or even 50 per player. Percentages are used in replacement on some cases in reference to the minimum population cap, these should be used instead.

Every Hour

Country Popularity Weight

The popluarity is how well, the overall population takes to each country. It gives each country the ratio for how the sims like the country. A high ratio means that the population is less likely to travel outside and more likely to travel inside of it. It also gives an indication on how many births are going to take place in the country. Each time the popularity is taken, it will be recorded for the player to see, and the daily ratio will be of all of the ratios during that day, which will be used for the birthing and recorded.

Traveling

This is dependent on each country and what they have set up in their options. Even if the traveling is restricted leaving, a percentage will still be able to escape and a smaller percentage will be killed doing so (if the controls is turned up to take that action. If the population is killed, then it would have to wait until the population is born again. The traveling population will be placed together and each one will decide where they want to go (just not back to where they came), based on the popularity and how well each of the sim takes to the country. The country with the highest popularity will get first pick and then each of the other countries will have a go going from the top to the bottom, until the traveling population reaches 0.

If a country has restricted access for criminals or set a limit to how many can enter the country, then the tests will also be done. If the sim is a criminal, then it doesn’t keep 100% of that kind out, a small percentage will be able to get in. The population will enter a country (if it has an extremely high popularity) until the limit (if there is one is taken up.

If a country has reached the minimum population limit, then the country can’t lose any more of its population, meaning no one can travel outside, but can travel inside.

The amount of sims that traveled (successfully or unsuccessfully or killed) will be recorded, so that the player can keep track of that information to judge how well, he is doing.

Deaths

Every Four Hours

Deaths from crime, lack of food, age, or health will be calculated every four hours. Death from wars is another factor, but that won’t be solved at this moment and will most likely be planned at the time it is being implemented.

Age

Each of the sims will be given an age that will determine what actions they will take. If the age is between 0-16, then it won’t take an active role in anything. Ages over 16 will be able to mate. Internally, statistically speaking a 65 year old would be able to mate with a 16 year old, unless that control is enacted that only 18 and above can mate, then those between 12 and 17 will mate or the age would temporary be moved up. This is done so that there is a great chance of birth taking place in a country with a small amount of sims (which has to have at least 60% females and 40% males of adult status of the minimum).

Food

If there isn’t enough food to feed the population (which is hard to come by, unless there is disaster or war or crime) then the younger population will start to die off.

Crime

Deaths from crime are rare, it is more that the criminals themselves are killed, depending on how the government functions and the rules for crime. If a criminal kills another and the government decides to kill that sim, then the country loses two members. It is better to kill off criminals because criminals breed criminals and crime. The criminal has to commit a crime first, and if the penalty is too high, then the chance of that happening is even rarer.

Health

Once a population has reached the cap where health is a governmental concern, then health facilities have to be built to improve how long the population will live. This equals out the countries with the big population and makes it harder for them to keep the population.

Every Day

Births

Births will take two parents and combine their characteristics into one child. It takes two sims in a country, both male and female to create a child that is either male (40%) or female (60%). Which characteristics the child gets is random. It there are more deaths then births then the cap won’t be filled, but the deaths should be decreased until the population cap has been reached. Also, if the gender percentages are off by more than 10% than the gender will be set until the gender percentages are back in place.

Age

Every day, the ages of the population will be moved up. The limits on how long a sim can live depends on the health (when the population gets high enough), food supply, and happiness. The absolute limit will be 200 years of age, but if there are only the minimum population, then the citizens can live longer than that. The old population will then live until the new population reaches the point double of the minimum (where the new population can sustain itself), then the old population will die in their sleep.

Jobs

Jobs or the lack of a job (depending on the population) will be changed, depending on the working age of the sims. The country would be able to set the age when the population can work. Child labor will decrease how long the sim will live. The lack of a job for the citizen should start around the same time the health becomes a factor.

New Resource

Every Month Could be changed to every two weeks.

Every player will get a free resource in their land, and will get a new one for being in the game. It is debatable whether to do it in a cron job, where a player can sign up exactly when the cron job is going to take place, but it is long enough to where it could be set in the game code to trigger based on the last time it occured, and when the player registered. I will implement both and test which one is better, but keep both anyway.

In some way, the resource that the player already has, will grow, to supply more. How this will be implemented will be difficult. It would allow more trade routes or give more to the player to stockpile to sell or trade with other players. The different resources will be needed by all players, depending on their tech tree. The resource required by the company will most likely be given first and then get other resources also needed by the company.

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Game AI

Posted by santosj on December 26, 2005 Comments Off

When I begin to work on the project, I’m going to work on the AI and do a few tests to make the Sims more human like. It will take a while to eventually get the sims to where they are more unpredictable and can’t be guessed by the players. There is always two or more ways to do the same thing, and I hope that the final implementation is something that is quick and does its job well.

Sim Personality

I was thinking of creating a table that has the personalities for each of the population. Which translate to one row for each of the sims, which can cause the game to get really big, really fast depending on the amount of members playing. It would be a good idea to have a limit for each of the population for each character. The personality and weight would most likely grow as the game matures. There has to be options for each of the configurations on what the player can set for their country and job, as well as the trade routes and whatever else is implemented.

AI Technique

I was thinking about using Fuzzy Logic for each of the sims based on the weight and also having limits, so that every player will have at least some sims in their country. The AI will eventually mature to Neural Networks as the AI progresses and the options and sim chooses grow. I would also want to have the sims give birth and die based on how much food and health there is in the country.

Population

The population will determine how much money the player receives and how many sims are working. The sims will have jobs and there will be a list of available jobs depending on the amount of players. So, as the population grows, the more jobs will be needed and the jobs will be filled. The population also determines the rank of the player.

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