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Author Topic: Organizing the Spheres  (Read 13574 times)

thunktone

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #30 on: May 20, 2011, 03:14:34 am »

Well, again, this comes back to the sort of chicken-or-egg question where it is worth asking if an area is powered by "Sky" biomes just because that's where the gods divided up the world, and as such, "Sky" power is infused in that area, regardless of what is actually there, or do we want "Sky" magic to only appear in specific landmasses?

I was leaning toward the second of those options. But it sounds as though you are thinking of each biome being either one sphere or another. I was assuming they could overlap and suggesting that the entire surface be affected by the sky sphere, every cavern by the cavern sphere, anywhere with high enough rainfall by the rain sphere, any significant battlefield by war etc. These spheres would probably need to be less special than if they were rarer, but you could still have some rare spheres that have a stronger effect like healing or nightmares.

Then again that ocean forest sounds pretty cool.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2011, 04:34:06 am by thunktone »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #31 on: May 30, 2015, 08:33:15 pm »

I wound up with a total of 9 Wilderness major spheres, and 13 Civilization major spheres. 
> The Wilderness major spheres are Caverns, Darkness, Death, Fire, Moon, Nature, Sun, Water, and Weather.
> The Civilization major spheres are Agriculture, Art, Chaos, Crafts, Family, Festivals, Happiness, Misery, Order, Peace, Scholarship, Travelers, and War.

[etc. etc. etc. long post]

I would suggest that you might want to take these things a few steps at a time.  You're trying to work out detailed mechanics for every single sphere before you really get to an agreement with others on what the criteria for good spheres should be.  Hence, if I disagree with some of your fundamental assumptions, then it follows that your conclusions are going to be things that I won't agree with, either, and it means that you might be wasting a lot of typing.  That Improved Farming Rebooted thread starts off with a long block of text, but it's also already built off of several arguments with dozens of people in the original Improved Farming thread, as a response to multiple angles of criticism.

First of all, I honestly think even 22 full biome-changing spheres is dealing with a little too many.  The 12 dualisms I had back then were certainly too many, and I'd probably find some way to chop them down.

In fact, considering how Toady is talking about a mythic arc in the latest portion of the game, you might have something like 10 or 20 spheres that might change the map, but there might only be 4 or 5 axes of power in a given worldgen, over which specific gods are warring.   This might make an earth-versus-heavens myth in one world, and music-versus-silence myth in another. 

Anyway, just looking at these again, I could probably consolidate things down by pulling Knowledge, Truth, Trickery, Song, Silence, Happiness, Misery, Beauty, and Deformity into two sphere dualisms, a "Truth/Knowledge versus Trickery" dualism, and an "Arts/Revelry versus Misery".  That pulls it down from 12 to 9, already. 

I guess my organizing spheres would be something like this:
  • Nature versus Undeath
  • Light, Dark, and Twilight (AAAA! SPARKLY VAMPIRES!)
  • Order (Law, fortress) versus Chaos (savagry)
  • Creation (Craft) versus Destruction (War)
  • Knowledge (+language) versus Illusion (and miscommunication/silence)
  • Revelry (Arts) versus Misery
  • Heavens versus Seas versus Earth
  • Desire (Greed + Glory) versus Humility

There, that consolidates to just 6 dualisms and 2 troilisms. 

1. In other words, this section is for player actions in fortress mode that seem likely to align the area of your fortress toward (or away from) this sphere.
2. Actions that are difficult to avoid doing make poor candidates for actions to align your fort with a specific sphere.  The basic concept is covered fairly well in the “Starting Build” wiki article, though not quite in this context. 
3. Since gods have spheres, their temples in general, and some furnishings and projects you can place in them, might help, but I don’t want to try that analysis just yet. 

Keep in mind that it's fine to have basic in-game actions cause problems when there either are ways to avoid using them, or there are ways to set up one basic action against another, such that doing both interferes with the energy buildup. 

For example, you might make both deforesting the surface and also excavating a mountain an energy-producing (or draining, as the case may be) effect.  Deforestation as a means of altering the embark into negative-nature-alignment (towards undeath for disturbing the nature spirits?) would help explain how elves react to dwarven exploitation of wood. 

Likewise, "digging too greedy and too deep" is part of the fundamental myth of dwarves this game represents.  They are creatures of mountains, but they eviscerate them for their wealth, and eventually get punished with a magical comeuppance when they try to push their luck.   Keep in mind that the HFS is meant to be a portal to another plane of existence that is simply crudely implemented in these versions of the game, and you could see it as a portal opening up due to a mountain god's vengeance. 


EDIT: Added spoiler to not have to scroll so far down when looking for other responses :P
« Last Edit: June 05, 2015, 12:54:16 am by NW_Kohaku »
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Tristan Alkai

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #32 on: June 02, 2015, 12:01:19 pm »

I was trying to avoid derailing the Xenosynthesis thread, and apologize to anyone that feels I failed to avoid it.  The attempt still meant trimming things that seemed off that topic.  That said, a lot of the problems brought up by NW_Kohaku were addressed in those cut sections.  Some have also been edited to more completely solve the issue. 

The most obvious stuff first:
> A lot of the current cavern wildlife has the [EVIL] tag, which implies that Caverns is at least allied to Darkness (which I have designated as the primary successor to at least the relevant aspects of the current Evil surroundings). 

This assumes darkness and evil are the same thing, which is a potential pitfall

"Night creatures" are generally hostile, but this isn't always strictly the case, and there can certainly be [EVIL] day-dwellers and nocturnal bats and cats aren't particularly evil.

I apologize if I gave the impression of Dark is Evil.  The trope I actually had in mind was Evil is Not Well Lit, or "Evil is Dark."  I have edited the Sun <=> Darkness section below to place a bit more emphasis on this.  I also directly referenced "Evil is Not Well Lit" in the original version of the Darkness major sphere description, but cut that part as beside the point of Xenosynthesis. 

O: Darkness is allied with Caverns (see that section for details). 

You really should be avoiding making every major sphere blend into one another.  The key example is that good and evil biomes are oppositional forces, and that savagery is irrelevant to the two.  It's possible to have Joyous Wilds and Terrifying biomes, which combines the functions of multiple spheres.

That is, any relation other than opposition should be irrelevancy such that they can overlap. 

If one depends on the other, and it's hard to imagine one without the other, it's probably best to just merge them.  We need a smaller set of these, anyway. 

I will concede "hard to imagine one without the other," but "one bleeds into the other" was a poor choice of words on my part.  I'll need to work on that one.  What I really had in mind was something more like what you outlined in the Improved Farming Thread, specifically the section on Fertilizers in reply #3:
Here's another important aspect to remember with using fertilizers, however: They rarely have one direct effect for using them.  There are about a dozen different variables for soil for a reason.  Everything you do to the soil will have an impact on more than one variable, not all of which are good.  This means overreliance upon any single resource will come back to bite you later on when you've managed to turn your soil toxic by trying to just apply the same fertilizers in absurd quantities to just force your soil to keep growing a single crop over and over. 

Again, "Everything you do to the soil will have an impact on more than one variable, not all of which are good." In other words, I assume that most actions, at least the ones that impact spheres at all, will impact several spheres simultaneously, and not necessarily only paired dualism ones.  That "Other Spheres" section was to look for actions particularly likely to have these sorts of overlapping results. 

A lot of the rest can be answered by the full Dualism section.  I specifically referenced part of it, labeled as part 2.  It was part 2 of 10.  Some of the Dualism section has been edited in response to complaints brought to my attention since the original post, and two complete additional parts have been added. 

Wilderness Sections
1. Sun <=> Darkness
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2. Nature <=> Moon <=> Death
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

3. Water <=> Fire
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

4. Weather <=> Caverns
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And a new section to respond to the criticism that “sky” (Water and Weather) and “Depths” (Fire and Caverns) blur together too much. 

A. Water <=> Weather
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

B. Caverns <=> Fire
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Civilization Sections

5. Order <=> Chaos
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

6. Scholarship <=> Festivals
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

7. Happiness <=> Misery
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

8. Peace <=> War
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

9. Family <=> Travelers
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

10. Agriculture <=> Crafts <=> Art
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So 8 pairs and 2 triads, not counting those two pair-breakers in the middle.  No independent spheres. 
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Dirst

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #33 on: June 03, 2015, 07:33:08 am »

Is there a particular reason a biome can't just have a rating for each Sphere, with the only special case being that with opposing Spheres only the highest rating exerts an influence?

The Sphere ratings themselves can vary smoothly from place to place (like elevation) with some consistency baked into the procedural generator, such as severely depressing the Ocean sphere in a desert or mountain.  Aligned Spheres will have similar influences, so their ratings will be correlated but not in lock-step.

Then plants and creatures can have Sphere tags with weights that affect its FREQUENCY in that biome.  For example, a crow might have SPHERE:SKY:25 and SPHERE:NIGHT:50 and SPHERE:DARKNESS:25 and SPHERE:NIGHTMARE:100 and SPHERE:EVIL:50.  This will flavor the flora and fauna appropriately without getting into a zillion creature variations.  Sphere-ish "evil weather" can be handled in a similar manner.  I'd also like to see a small number of minerals associated with Spheres.

After that's in place, then maybe work on the zillion creature variations, preferably in a way that can be modded.
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Mel_Vixen

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #34 on: June 04, 2015, 02:42:59 pm »

I realy dont see good/evil as spheres, neither benign/savage. What i would see them is as a modifier for a spherical place.

Good would be for me a benevolent bend of a sphere, fires that warm you, nature that nurtures you back to health etc.
Conversely evil would take a malevolent bend bringing destructive fires, beasts that stalk you and so on.
Savagery means mostly that you get more vigorous flora and fauna compared to the baseline a more highenergy environment i would say.

That being said i would see very sphere on a Spectrum, a Sphere might tend to one side (good evil). I dont really see thought how the notion of opposed Spheres makes sense. This notion is just an Idea of the patern-seeking human mind which might work well in religion and tropes for the various cultures. I can see fire and water working together (Steam, Geysirs) as much Light and darkness (shadows, cotrasts, colorplay) and yet still have them opposed in other areas.

A System that is more interactive in the spheres (given that we get places with multi-sphere allignment) rather then strictly oppositonal would lend itself better to procedural generation and would increase replayability since these places wouldnt be as predictable.
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« Last Edit: June 04, 2015, 02:47:13 pm by Heph »
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Dirst

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #35 on: June 04, 2015, 02:55:10 pm »

The Spheres already have some "aligned" and "opposed/exclusive" relationships.  This is a suggestion forum, so you can advocate scrapping that if you'd like.

What if the relative disharmony of the Shperes in a biome gives it a derived Savagery score?  Very reasonable combinations of influences lead to calm areas while strange juxtapositions lead to savage areas.  It will give them a more alien feel that isn't generic Giants Animals Live Here.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #36 on: June 04, 2015, 03:23:05 pm »

I'll work up to responding to Tristan in a bit, but first...

I realy dont see good/evil as spheres, neither benign/savage. What i would see them is as a modifier for a spherical place.

Toady has said that he wants to remove the current placeholder Good/Evil/Savage surroundings with spheres, and this thread is specifically about ways to go about doing that. 


Hence, Good/Evil/Savage are going to be gone, and replaced with a system that creates regions/surroundings based upon spheres. As such, trying to fit spheres into Good/Evil/Savage is based upon assumptions that will no longer be valid as Toady advances development of the game.

The point of this thread is to talk about how to make 130 spheres behave sanely when they are in the game as a replacement for Good/Evil/Savage.  There obviously are only so many ways in which the game can be altered to fit spheric surroundings.  It is also a side-point of the thread to talk about how the spheres can be altered by player actions, as that is partly hinted at in some of Toady/Three Toe's works, and could make a more interesting interaction between player and environment if the player is actually capable of so desecrating the land that the land itself raises the dead to stop the player. 

Is there a particular reason a biome can't just have a rating for each Sphere, with the only special case being that with opposing Spheres only the highest rating exerts an influence?

Having opposing spheres makes player manipulation easier.  Otherwise, if player actions always add to a sphere's presence in an embark, you tend to wind up with an entropic decay problem. 

Having opposing spheres (like how evil and good are opposed) also make the game much simpler since you're only checking for one variable across the landscape, rather than two, and the point is to cram as many features for different spheres into as simple a system as possible.  Therefore, opposing spheres are optimal, as cramming all 130 spheres into just 8 different values on the map is much less data to cram (and crap for players to memorize or search for) than 130 individual sphere affinities. 

The Sphere ratings themselves can vary smoothly from place to place (like elevation) with some consistency baked into the procedural generator, such as severely depressing the Ocean sphere in a desert or mountain.  Aligned Spheres will have similar influences, so their ratings will be correlated but not in lock-step.

While something like that might be possible, it may not necessarily be desirable. 

After all, oceans don't have oceanic life just because it has an ocean sphere prevalence, oceans have oceanic life because that's what's adapted to live there.  Only a few oceans should have a full-on "Ocean sphere" surrounding, which would have different kinds of oceanic life than a normal ocean.  Likewise, an ocean sphere is far more interesting in a desert than it is in the ocean already, where you might declare that suddenly, whales can walk on land as the special feature of an oceanic sphere surrounding.  Landwhales in the desert is more interesting than extra whales in a given ocean. 
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Dirst

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #37 on: June 04, 2015, 04:33:04 pm »

The land whales fit in with the later idea about derived "savagery".  You don't want ambulocetus showing up on every shoreline, nor only when a very specific combination of Spheres appears, by rather just in "strange" places. 

Edit: Should have been a bit more specific.  The land whale might be associated with the Ocean sphere, designated to appear on certain land biomes, and be associated with "savage" biomes (though this is a replacement for the Savage placeholder and would almost certainly need a new name).  The creature itself would likely be in the raws as a creature variation of whales.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2015, 07:38:41 am by Dirst »
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Mel_Vixen

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #38 on: June 04, 2015, 07:19:36 pm »

The Spheres already have some "aligned" and "opposed/exclusive" relationships.  This is a suggestion forum, so you can advocate scrapping that if you'd like.


I realy dont see good/evil as spheres, neither benign/savage. What i would see them is as a modifier for a spherical place.

Toady has said that he wants to remove the current placeholder Good/Evil/Savage surroundings with spheres, and this thread is specifically about ways to go about doing that. 


I always asumed that only holds true for the religions since the opposition of these spheres is used to stir up religious Wars in Worldgen. And yes i know Toady said he wants top Scrap the Good/evil placeholder, i just advocate that they could evolve into a modifier for the areas. Darn it i am lurking on the FotF thread for as long we are in the 3D versions. For fucks sake i think i asked one of the question about spheres back then.

*sips hir earl gray to calm down*

My critique was mostly geared towards Tristan Alkai's ideas, i should have been more clear about that.

What current wikipage doesnt mention (which did disappoint me)  is that spheres can have superspheres (see the 40D version: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Sphere), yeah there is the precluding list but as i said till further notice i would asume this goes only for religion and deity creation although i have seen some very weird combinations in those. Toady made the precludes pretty loose so we can have weird combos.

The Parent-child relationships can be used to set up some effects that hold true for all spheres in a parent child relationship. Even further you could have effects bleed over from one sphere to another in a friend relationships.

Also might i suggest to break the list of spheres down into ones that affect the surrounding f.e. physical objects and the ones that would affect the psyche of a being? To mind come spheres like the art family, courage/valor, generosity, crafts, murder, torture, rumors etc. These things mostly deal with ideas, urges, inclinations, the sphere haveing an effect that may or may not be very subtle since they influence dwarves and other cultured being in nonobvious ways. A murder sphere might just reduce the Mood tresholfd for macabre moods and increase the likelyhood of deadly tanturms. Things that might not be apparent at first.

The physical spheres, take fire are much more obvious in some regards. Making things hot, burning creatures, exploding trees, exploding corpses, fireproof hides, furs and scales, bombadeer beetle like attacks, plants that need fire to spread/renew, ash eating thingies, clouds of smoke hovering constantly over the area etc.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #39 on: June 04, 2015, 11:22:26 pm »

I'm still trying to find what Tristan actually edited when they said they edited something in the previous post...  Actually, it seems there's no edited tag at all... So what do you mean edited?

My critique was mostly geared towards Tristan Alkai's ideas, i should have been more clear about that.

Sorry about that, I didn't quite get what you meant, then.

What current wikipage doesnt mention (which did disappoint me)  is that spheres can have superspheres (see the 40D version: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Sphere), yeah there is the precluding list but as i said till further notice i would asume this goes only for religion and deity creation although i have seen some very weird combinations in those. Toady made the precludes pretty loose so we can have weird combos.

Yeah, I link to the 40d version in the OP, as well, because that's the version of the wiki that has the full information.

The problem is, nowhere near enough of them are put into a useful hierarchy, and most are just put into "friend" relations, at best.  (And many friend relations form a sort of "ring species", since Writing is a friend of Scholarship, and Scholarship is a friend of Wisdom, but Wisdom is not a friend of Writing.)  The adversarial relations are the most useful feature.   

Also might i suggest to break the list of spheres down into ones that affect the surrounding f.e. physical objects and the ones that would affect the psyche of a being?

Yeah, this was generally my intent to revise it towards a collection of actual "things it would do", rather than just conceptual groupings. 

Spheres that would be a place for the existing giant animals or animal-people or zombies to fit into would be obvious starting points, especially if they were split up to fit into more than just a couple spheres. Currently, we have a positive glut of giant and animal-person creatures thanks to that zoo donation drive upping their number so much, but the fact that Toady added in the "copy the other creature, and multiply its size by 8" code, it shows there's probably room to very easily add in ways to just slap a new feature onto existing animals, and make it so there's a hundred varieties of creature for an ocean-sphere surrounding that become amphibious, for example. 
« Last Edit: June 04, 2015, 11:33:03 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #40 on: June 05, 2015, 12:40:21 am »

I will concede "hard to imagine one without the other," but "one bleeds into the other" was a poor choice of words on my part.  I'll need to work on that one.  What I really had in mind was something more like what you outlined in the Improved Farming Thread, specifically the section on Fertilizers in reply #3:
Here's another important aspect to remember with using fertilizers, however: They rarely have one direct effect for using them.  There are about a dozen different variables for soil for a reason.  Everything you do to the soil will have an impact on more than one variable, not all of which are good.  This means overreliance upon any single resource will come back to bite you later on when you've managed to turn your soil toxic by trying to just apply the same fertilizers in absurd quantities to just force your soil to keep growing a single crop over and over. 

Again, "Everything you do to the soil will have an impact on more than one variable, not all of which are good." In other words, I assume that most actions, at least the ones that impact spheres at all, will impact several spheres simultaneously, and not necessarily only paired dualism ones.  That "Other Spheres" section was to look for actions particularly likely to have these sorts of overlapping results. 

Well, farming nutrients and spheres are two totally different kettles of fish. 

Part of the point of farming was to be a bit more blurry and indistinct, and not to force players to rely solely upon a single resource to get farming done.  This is because farming needs the presence (or lack thereof) of every type of nutrient. 

Spheres, however, really shouldn't all be present all the time.  If every single sphere was active all at once, and all had similar effects, how would you even be able to tell when something is happening because of one sphere or the other?  If you can't tell the difference, why bother having them distinguished at all? 

A lot of the rest can be answered by the full Dualism section.  I specifically referenced part of it, labeled as part 2.  It was part 2 of 10.  Some of the Dualism section has been edited in response to complaints brought to my attention since the original post, and two complete additional parts have been added.

... Which part 2, exactly?  You have a lot of different numbered lists.  In the bold-lettered "DUALISM" section, you just have 2. as the only member of the list for the Nature-Moon-Death trio.  In that section, you just said why you thought each was opposed to the other.  I don't see any 10 there...

Revised list

Well, I think this is one of those "agree to disagree" things, because I just can't really come around to agreeing with concepts like that Moon should be associated with concepts of Boundaries instead of Boundaries, itself.  I'd personally see Moon associated with Night or Dreams or Darkness in my own conception. (And in the 40d lists, Moon is friends with Night and Sky, and opposes nothing, not even Sun... I also have a Male Dwarf deity of Moon and Stars in my current fortress.)

That said, I certainly opened this up for rival conceptualizations of the spheres at the outset of this thread, so by all means, have your own rival theory, and say why you don't think mine works, as well. 

However, since it would be rude not to comment at all after you went to the trouble of posting all that, I'll try to make some critiques of the new things:

Spoiler: longish (click to show/hide)

In any event, I'll try to put together a revised list of my own, and reasoning behind them, as well as game effects, as a more comprehensive model for critique, myself.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2015, 12:45:00 am by NW_Kohaku »
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AceSV

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #41 on: June 05, 2015, 12:51:04 pm »

Sorry I haven't read the entire thread, but I have another way of thinking about this.  Rather than treating the spheres as primordial forces, the sphere can just be considered a building block for gods and religion.  So instead of, what would a murder biome be like? ask, what would the god of murder's biome be like?  Instead of a spherical biome representing a spot where primordial forces override sensible reality, they would be holy lands of a particular god. 

This would make the concept of duality relative to each world's gang of gods.  For example, if the world gen made the Greek Gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades might compete against each other, so Thunder biomes, Death biomes, and Water biomes would oppose each other in that world.  And gods can be generated with more than one sphere.  Zeus for instance might represent both Thunder and Lust, while Odin might represent War and Poetry, so Zeus' biome might be constantly struck by lightning and prone to clouds of aphrodisiac gas, while Odin's is full of ravenman knights quothing NEVERMORE. 

I think enforcing duality is boring.  Why shouldn't there be unicorn zombies? 
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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #42 on: June 05, 2015, 11:57:42 pm »

Sorry I haven't read the entire thread, but I have another way of thinking about this.  Rather than treating the spheres as primordial forces, the sphere can just be considered a building block for gods and religion.  So instead of, what would a murder biome be like? ask, what would the god of murder's biome be like?  Instead of a spherical biome representing a spot where primordial forces override sensible reality, they would be holy lands of a particular god. 

This would make the concept of duality relative to each world's gang of gods.  For example, if the world gen made the Greek Gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades might compete against each other, so Thunder biomes, Death biomes, and Water biomes would oppose each other in that world.  And gods can be generated with more than one sphere.  Zeus for instance might represent both Thunder and Lust, while Odin might represent War and Poetry, so Zeus' biome might be constantly struck by lightning and prone to clouds of aphrodisiac gas, while Odin's is full of ravenman knights quothing NEVERMORE. 

I think enforcing duality is boring.  Why shouldn't there be unicorn zombies?

You can have zombie unicorns, already.  (You just need either evil and good biomes on the same map, or a necromancer in a good map.)

But anyway, I suggested specific spheres only appearing randomly earlier, although to what end?  There's no reason to have worlds with no savagry or no evil in the current game (outside of worldgen parameters precluding them) since you're just cutting off an already limited variety of unique locations.  It only makes sense to start cutting down the number of spheres with special effects upon the world when we have enough special effects in play upon the world that we can cut down on them at the start of worldgen without just cutting off a giant chunk of the game's interesting creatures.

Besides that, in our current system, gods don't make the world, civilizations make the gods.  Every dwarf civ is required to have their own deity that relates to fortresses, one relating to wealth, and a few other things.  Hence, you would always wind up with the same spheres, just because those are mandated by the entity standard raws.

Likewise, deities tend to choose spheres based upon friend spheres, and a thunder-sex god is not supported by the current system.

Feel free to suggest changes to gods, but that's not the purpose of this thread. (It is more the purpose of this one, though.)
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Tristan Alkai

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #43 on: June 11, 2015, 12:44:14 pm »

I will properly reply to NW_Kohaku's long list of critiques in a bit.  Everyone else is more straightforward.  So are a few mechanical issues

1. Text File
I'm still trying to find what Tristan actually edited when they said they edited something in the previous post...  Actually, it seems there's no edited tag at all... So what do you mean edited?

I have my main description of the spheres, from which I drew both the sphere descriptions in the Xenosynthesis thread, and the dualism section earlier in this one, as a (single, large) text file on my computer at home.  I transfer sections from that text file to forum posts.  The edits I referred to were to the Dualism section of that text file, after I read your responses, before I posted the newly revised version of that section on the forum. 

A lot of the rest can be answered by the full Dualism section.  I specifically referenced part of it, labeled as part 2.  It was part 2 of 10.  Some of the Dualism section has been edited in response to complaints brought to my attention since the original post, and two complete additional parts have been added.

... Which part 2, exactly?  You have a lot of different numbered lists.  In the bold-lettered "DUALISM" section, you just have 2. as the only member of the list for the Nature-Moon-Death trio.  In that section, you just said why you thought each was opposed to the other.  I don't see any 10 there...

Part 2 of the Dualism section.  I cut parts 1 and 3-10 from the Xenosynthesis post because I felt they were off that topic.  The specific Nature <=> Moon <=> Death section (part 2 of 10) was more directly referred to in those three main major sphere descriptions, so I felt it was important enough to include.  Leaving the number 2 in front of it was deliberate, and supposed to hint "there used to be more here."  I apologize for that lack of clarity. 

2. Physical <=> Mental
Also might i suggest to break the list of spheres down into ones that affect the surrounding i.e. physical objects and the ones that would affect the psyche of a being?

This is essentially what I was trying to get at referring to "Wilderness" spheres and "Civilization" spheres in my descriptions.  These are, respectively, "physical" and "psyche" (or "mental").  Same idea, different words to refer to it, and possibly a different emphasis.  Thank you for the better choice of words. 

To go back to my starting position last time, if I disagree on the fundamental assumptions of what you're trying to accomplish, I can't agree with any of the resulting conclusions.  Apparently, you see this nature/civilization conflict as some core part of your philosophic viewpoint on the world, but I simply don't, and therefore any time you try to reference things as "obvious", they simply make no sense to me.

I often end up referring to things with the first synonym that comes to mind, not the best one that might apply.  Physical / Mental represents what I was trying to say much better than Wilderness / Civilization.  Now that that's established, do we still disagree? 

3. Placeholders
The Spheres already have some "aligned" and "opposed/exclusive" relationships.  This is a suggestion forum, so you can advocate scrapping that if you'd like.

What if the relative disharmony of the Shperes in a biome gives it a derived Savagery score?  Very reasonable combinations of influences lead to calm areas while strange juxtapositions lead to savage areas.  It will give them a more alien feel that isn't generic Giants Animals Live Here.

I realy dont see good/evil as spheres, neither benign/savage. What i would see them is as a modifier for a spherical place.

I guess I missed the current list of "aligned" and "opposed" relationships.  The list I copied into my text file for dissection was from the DF2014 version of the page, which does not include those sections.  I just copied the bare sphere list, and improvised from there on my own.  I guess I'll need to go over those lists at some point. 

For "derived savagery" or "treating them as a modifier," I don't have a starting point to start trying to figure that out.  The current Good / Evil / Savage is explicitly labeled as a placeholder for sphere-based surroundings.  I therefore tacitly assumed that the full version would display most of the same behavior and mechanics.  Presumably, more behaviors would be available, but the general categories of behavior (magical plants, creatures, and sometimes weather) would be the same.  From this it follows that I looked for successors to Good, Savage, and Evil in my major sphere descriptions (in the Xenosynthesis post linked above).  Nature was a nice successor to Savage.  Moon was a rather less nice successor to Good.  Evil got split into different aspects, which got distributed between Death and Darkness. 

On the topic of mechanics, the main ones I see are oppositions and overlaps.  An area can be Good or Evil, but not both at once; the two "sphere placeholders" are opposed.  The same goes for Benign and Savage.  On the other hand, an area that is Good can be Benign, Savage, or neither; the two opposed pairs are represented as independent and perpendicular axes, and any combination can occur. 

I also look to the placeholders to predict what will happen when spheres do overlap.  A "Joyous Wilds" area (Good and Savage) displays both Good alterations (like unicorns and sun berries) and Savage alterations (like giant badgers and whip vines).  The two kinds of magical wildlife exist side by side in the same area, but any given plant or creature is magically altered by only one of the above. 

4. Sphere ratings
Is there a particular reason a biome can't just have a rating for each Sphere, with the only special case being that with opposing Spheres only the highest rating exerts an influence?

The Sphere ratings themselves can vary smoothly from place to place (like elevation) with some consistency baked into the procedural generator, such as severely depressing the Ocean sphere in a desert or mountain.  Aligned Spheres will have similar influences, so their ratings will be correlated but not in lock-step.

Then plants and creatures can have Sphere tags with weights that affect its FREQUENCY in that biome.  For example, a crow might have SPHERE:SKY:25 and SPHERE:NIGHT:50 and SPHERE:DARKNESS:25 and SPHERE:NIGHTMARE:100 and SPHERE:EVIL:50.  This will flavor the flora and fauna appropriately without getting into a zillion creature variations.  Sphere-ish "evil weather" can be handled in a similar manner.  I'd also like to see a small number of minerals associated with Spheres.

After that's in place, then maybe work on the zillion creature variations, preferably in a way that can be modded.

There are 130 spheres, and some of my own disagreements with the current list might expand that to 133-135.  That is a lot of numbers to keep track of, even if the computer only displays a tiny sub-set of that data.  The main reason I picked out a much smaller list of "major" spheres (22, of which 9 were "physical"), and left the rest as "minor" spheres, was to cut down that data to something more manageable.  NW_Kohaku had the same idea, but used different labels. 

Dualisms serve the same purpose.  Each opposed pair reduces the data from two independent numbers to one signed number. 

As for "severely depressing the Ocean sphere in a desert or mountain," see the above section about placeholders; I assume that sphere-based surroundings will display most of the same behaviors and mechanics as the current Good, Evil, and Savage.  One relevant point that I overlooked there was that every biome can have any surroundings, and vice versa.  I guess I really should take a hard look at my current Water major sphere and see what I can do about preventing it from disrupting that independence. 

As for "the zillions of creature variations," I already mostly covered that elsewhere.  This quote is from the "Xenosynthesis and Magic Fields" thread (General board). 
Implications part 3: Magically Altered creatures
1. On the main Bay12 Dwarf Fortress page is a tab for “Threetoe’s Stories.”  One in particular, titled “Forest Befouled” describes an area changing sphere alignment (from Good to Evil).  This has a very curious effect: the satyrs (Good-aligned) living in the area transform to foul blendecs (Evil-aligned). 
2. A different story, titled “Root,” has a scene where a squirrel is transformed by the Forest Spirit into a squirrel man.  These two scenes lead to the question of exactly how to duplicate this behavior in the game. 
3. The game already has the [APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION] command, found in the raws of certain creatures.  It can accept the arguments “animal person” and “giant” (and various “gaits” that are off this topic).  Duplicating the behavior from “Forest Befouled” and “Root” would involve re-working this tag.  The creature raws would instead say something like “Accept creature variation” and there would be some circumstances in the game under which it could be applied.  To duplicate the events of “Forest Befouled,” Satyr and Foul Blendec would be different variations applied to the same mundane base creature (probably a goat). 
4. Toady One has stated a desire for less-predictable magic, and this system can accommodate that: creature variations can be procedurally generated, and acceptance by creatures can be based on tags attached to the variation, rather than directly by its name. 
5. “Forest Befouled” also requires circumstances under which a creature variation can be removed.  A partial solution is a “hunger” counter associated with the variation, separate from that of the creature it is attached to.  When this runs out, the variation wears off and the creature reverts to its mundane state.  This supports the general “The Magic Goes Away” tone of Dwarf Fortress (Ages of Myth, Legends, and Heroes), but the immediate change described in the story would require different programming, which I don’t know enough to advise about.

Adding a tag for "[ACCEPT_CREATURE_VARIATION:]" that can accept various arguments would allow most of what you seem to be trying to do with this one.  Each of these "creature variations" would be aligned with a major sphere, and creatures could gain and lose these variations over the course of world generation and play. 

This also goes back to cutting down on the data: a range of available creature variations, and tags in creature raws to allow them to accept these variations, is a lot less data than the current solution of a long list of already varied creatures (animal people and giant animals), each a completely separate species from the mundane creature it resembles, as well as other species varied from the same mundane base creature.  (At least it's a lot less data for a modder to handle; I'm not sure about the computer.) 

Cutting down on the data also means keeping the number of potential creature variations somewhat limited.  I work toward that goal by reducing their possible sphere associations from the full list to a smaller number of "major spheres."  The shorter list of potential sphere associations also means that a lot less reading and looking up would be required to mod things effectively. 

Sphere minerals could be fun.  I wouldn't have thought of that one, since I came at the topic from the wrong starting point. 
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Dirst

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Re: Organizing the Spheres
« Reply #44 on: June 11, 2015, 02:27:14 pm »

Quick note, the Sphere relationships are at http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Sphere and they probably still have the same relationships.

More substantive reply later.
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