There has been another gap between posts. But I suppose you've already realized I'm not the most active blogger ))). A great deal has been done in the background, though.
In my last post, I showed a planet: one of tens of thousands where you can land a ship and do various things. Here's what “various things” means. Every planetary hex opens into a unique map matching its surface type. The map is 1,000 hexes across. It is a hexagon rather than a square, so its area contains roughly 700,000 small hexes. Mountains, plains, swamps. Rivers aren't done yet, and lakes are still a little buggy.
Trees can grow on every hex. You can also place buildings there. So far, there is only a research camp, but many other structures are coming soon. This already works.
The intended scale of each small hex is only 100 meters. So colony construction will be quite detailed, especially in light of the work done over the past week.
The economy: the relationships between substances, resources, and the processes used to extract and process them. What do we usually get? Wood, stone, coal, gold? ))) Perhaps you've read and remember the list of 108 resources. Without going into all the details, many of them are deposits of useful, and less useful, minerals. Each resource is a geologically accurate mixture of different minerals. You can extract and use all of it, but not as a generic “stone” resource. You mine unprocessed ore, a mixture of minerals. If you process and concentrate that ore, you obtain an ore concentrate, accompanying by-products, and usually waste in the form of silicon oxide.
Incidentally, each mineral is also linked to the periodic table, just in case.
The ore-concentration processes can differ, require different equipment, and consume different inputs. How do we fit all that in? We have to think ahead about having what is needed to begin work.
Next, the concentrate goes to smelting. Different processes are possible there, too, producing ingots of cast iron, steel, or soft iron. Incidentally, we have about ten grades of steel.
These can then be rolled into stock such as beams, channels, pipes, and sheets. Those, in turn, can be turned into building structures. And so on.
It is impossible to describe all of this in a post right now because, if we call every production process, material, mineral, or chemical compound a node in a graph, and the connections between them edges, our database currently has close to 3,000 nodes and more than 10,000 edges. Today I spent a little more time on the agricultural sector, particularly waste products: oilseed cake, sawdust, and so on.
The economic component of our game will be THE most complex of any game in the world, by a considerable margin.
Is that good or bad? It depends on how it is used. You can't expect players to have such specialized knowledge. But you can show them, in a convenient way, what they need to organize to get the result they want, and offer guidance along the way. You can also help them understand why almost no country in the modern world can live in complete isolation.
And why carmakers have 5,000 subcontractors. Of course, I'm simplifying and grouping things heavily; a car factory itself will probably need about 15–20 contractors. Still, those contractors will have subcontractors of their own, so the total could grow to 100.
For example, to make plastic parts, you have to mold them from a material made at a completely different factory, and so on. An approximate chain is: oil deposit → extraction → refining → distillation → granules → plastic. But the granules will probably need another input branch, because that stage requires various chemicals, some of them complex. Why “probably”? I'm writing this on my phone and don't have the database in front of me. It's all recorded there, though, in detail.
Of course, you won't have to manufacture every piston for an engine. But an engine won't be made from iron alone either, if only because modern engine blocks are made of aluminum.. )))).
That's how far we've taken it. Of course, all of this still needs polishing and tuning, but the foundation is already there, and adding things to it no longer looks difficult.
What do you think? Ideas, comments?
