He he -- you won't have to worry about seed numbers for long. This weekend I'm going to put up version 0.03.36g, which is the last speed fix. The version AFTER that includes save/load:
Saving and loading in Armok covers a lot of your concerns. Right now, this is what I'm thinking -- there are two types of objects, actual saved universes and "universe definitions". A universe definition is just the seed/genre/atmosphere/plot. In current terms that would be the seed and Demon's land percentage counter 
The universe definiton information acts together to produce a universe, that is, if you change some of the information, but keep the seed the same, you'll get a completely different universe. All of the information matters. Now for actual saved universes, there are two types -- active and inactive. An active universe is a universe that has a player living in it. When you load these, you'll go back to your old game and can continue playing. When you load an inactive universe, you will create a new character to live in a universe that has had previous players in it (much like it was before). The game will have some way of deciding, or allowing you to decide, how much time will pass between players. You'll be able to copy universes and so on, so that you can (for example) have two universes running with the same universe definition to see how they both turn out.
You'll be able to take universe definitions and saved universes and send them to your friends, and so on. Using the active/inactive universes, you could, say, create a universe, run a single player, and send the file to a friend. That friend could run one game and send it back. In this way, you can build on each other's previous characters and surprise each other with the massive changes you've made to the universe -- or maybe just the obscene graffiti that you scrawled on the previous player's tombstone.
I really don't have a good estimate how much disk space a universe will take -- hopefully it won't prohibit easy transfer to other computers.
One "limitation" to the system that I can see is that you can only run one player in a universe at a time. It is possible to get around this -- if you take an active universe and tell the game that you want to create a new player, the old player could be turned into a magical statue for example. After the new player is done, you could activate the old statue and finish that game, although the world would be advanced from the position the old player was used to (the new player could bury the statue for instance). This would permit various forms of cheating (like taking risks with new players to gather valuables for the old player), although this would allow you to simulate the action of a party of adventurers or a crime ring, for example. That's kind of a trashy system though -- perhaps sometime I should add multi-character player parties, so that you can just do it like a normal game. "One player + NPCs" parties are only marginally easier to add (and harder in some ways), so it's not really a big deal.
Although "Armok" wouldn't necessarily appear in most universes, the whole notion of Armok's Hall of Blood that I have now could be used to keep track of trans-universal high scores (ie your "best" games and legends, regardless of universe), as well a many other important trans-universal statistics (who holds the record for most creatures ever killed in any universe, and so on). The player legends/tales/drunken bar stories and so on would be restricted to whatever universe that player was in. It will be almost impossible to compare scores between different universes, but it might be worthwhile to at least try -- the trans-universal statistics might be more interesting to many people.
This save/load system could also be used to completely tear a given player out of his or her universe and stick him or her in an entirely new one. I'm not sure why you'd want to do this (it will (almost?) always be sufficient to simply travel to a new world/plane within the same universe, and it would be more proper in a sense).
----------------
other stuff
I know the going into houses when you're giant looks dumb... not sure when I'll get to that. I'm also not sure how much of the "clean up" is going to get done before I feel the pull to start the motif editor. When I add getting blocked by doorways, the other blockages will follow naturally -- I'm simply not going to let large creatures enter small areas. The map is still represented underneath all the semi-fancy graphics by a 3D grid, so this is easy.
Clothing had better be displayed on models eventually, or I'll have to add another item to my content warning. It shouldn't be all that hard to do. Depending on the clothing/armor type, it will either change the texture or replace some body parts in the model with larger clothing/armor models. There shouldn't be any significant speed issues associated with this, since any body parts that are covered will not be printed.
Quadruped bodies are really bad -- I think that might be slightly better now, but it is still bad. The problem is, humanoid creatures (humans being the only good example in real life terms) have very very very large legs compared to the rest of their bodies. Normal quadrupeds shouldn't have such giant legs and arms. All of the quads look like those long legged things from the Dark Crystal right now. I'll probably fix this when I get to lizards in the motif editor version -- lizards almost never have large legs, so far as I know -- reptilian dragons are usually drawn with larger-than-normal-reptile legs, though.
Needless to say, we hope you don't die when the species editor comes out. I wonder how the model maker would react to all of those new creatures you want to make... it should be versatile enough the way it is to at least make a half-assed approximation to any of them, although there are undoubtedly some unconscious humanoid/quadruped assumptions that have tainted the system. These will be purged as people complain.
Uck... I spell "quadruped" wrong way too often. I always write "quadraped". It must come from "quadratic equations"... it can't come from "quadrilateral" or "quadrennial". At least there aren't a whole lot of "quadro" words.
I'm going to add some more species characteristic comparison to character creation later on. I probably wouldn't be able to fit everything I want on that screen, so you'll probably be able to, say, right click on a creature in the list to pop up some stats/comparisons, etc.
Lessee... so of course, in a regular sort of sense, playing non-living critters is improper. That would be a bad design decision though, since some people want to play them and those that don't won't. So sure. As far as powers go, any sort of power a deity has, you'd have if you are able to play a deity. Deities with a physical form would be trivial to set up for play. Abstract gods that just kinda exist and cause miracles and the writing of books and stuff would be harder to set up, since the player doesn't occupy a location and so on. We'll see about those -- I'm not morally against having people play them, it's just the time constraints as usual.
Author
Topic: various things (Read 13203 times)