The case for an overhead view

[yellowdaddy]

I like an awful lot of things about this game, but there are one or two things that really have got to go.

1. the name - i dislike any name which uses Civ-something or the word civilisation, the name also doesn't seem to match the content too well - and frankly, it just has too many syllables - you're already shortening it! Names I toyed with include:

Cosmos,
T.U.S. the universal simulator
Sim World,
Man,
Humanity,
Ethnos,
Origin,
Ipsissimus,
Destiny,
Globe,
E,

i'd rather go with something more humourous, but no ideas as yet

2. isometic view.yuck.

the game i began to design almost a year before Civ 1 came out on amiga, was inspired by the amiga version of Sim City:

.http://www.rolemaker.dk/documents/Re...gy/SimCity.htm


and i thought good old SWIV style battles would be lovely, albeit with amusingly animated tiny stick men [less work!]

http://www.commodore-amiga.de/games_ns.htm

the third screenshot down

since sim city and civ made the change from overhead to isometric, it has become fashionable, and with the diagonal 3d hills and valleys first seen in Populous now getting everywhere - how can a top down view compete? how can you show lovely rolling countryside in a comparatively satisfying way?

ALTITUDE! - simple, i think - different LUMINOSITY levels. each tile has a biome hue and an altitude luminosity setting, altitude/depth on a logarithmic scale
the overlays need only be for the Tac. and Strat maps, mainly the Tac. Map. and no complex unit icons - just unit types, more detail, the closer the map level, but the bottom two map levels can have most of the detail.
my map design has been one of the core elements to my design since i began. i am talking about a huge map compared to civilisation, split into 5 levels.

below 0m, 0m, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1.6km, 3.2km, 6.4km, 12.8km [the last one more relevant for the mariana trench, or spyplanes!]

here's how the map system works:

the Earth is 12,756km in diameter [roughly]
so if each km was represented by a pixel, you would have a map 25,512 x 12,756 pixels = 325,431,072 pixels

I decided that as i wanted to have contemporary scenarios, the smallest island nation, Nauru 21sq.km, should be representable by 1 tile.
[Vatican, Monaco, Gibraltar, San Marino, Pitcairn I., Macau etc... will just have to be 1 pixel too]

so each tile would be round to 16 sq. km, or 4km by 4km.

so how many pixels on the world map?
12756 x 6378
81, 357, 768 pixels/game tiles

[or maybe scaled down by a factor of 4 to: 6378 x 3189 = 20,339,442 pixels & game tiles.

the map levels as such

level 5: world map - as mentioned above

level 4: regional map - about 1/6 of the world map, for continental overview

level 3: strategic map - 1/8 of the regional map, for a country level view

level 2: tactical map - 1/8 o the strategic map, the main map to a lagre extent.

level 1: action map - a semi-arcade map of each game tile in detail for city managament a la Simcity amiga, and combat a la Silkworm 4.

cities, being able to sprawl and merge occupying more than one tile, London for example would cover around 90 tiles.

different density levels - depending on the type of housing - oriental cities are frequently more dense than European cities.

and different city layout overlays - some nuclear, some linear some coast hugging. even the concept of dispersed rural villages - a tile which is populated, but has no major centre.

i will have a set of screenshots with a pretty interface included, and maybe a macromedai demo if i can be arsed.

3. the lack of languages - this is another of the sacred calves of my design, as a university educated linguist, i have done extensive research into this, and i think it probably deserves another thread. but to summarize i boiled humanity down to 72 "peoples", which could split into 432 "tribes", and thence into 2,592 "nations". with the additional feature of ethnic mergers and completely new ethnicities - i have a lot to say about your cultural ideas, and i think i can certainly add to that aspect of the game. rather than go on, hold this thought: imagine that the Iroqouis, Cherokee, and Apache indians developed to point where THEY discovered and colonised Europe, and Iroqouis became the Latin, and not just the map but the ethnic makeup of Europe was unrecognisibly different - no Spain, so no Colombia, so no... fill in the blanks.


4. faces. in short, i have a full set of face parts divided into 4 races, enough, i reckon to generate hundres of thousands of unique faces. they were a shared feature of my game "Cosmos" and a football game i designed called "Footy".

i also designed some others "Terry Flinger" a jerry springer - argue-em up/beat em up, "Vinegar Strokes" a masturbation game. and a GTA Vice City like game using the same Cosomos structure really - but that could be a intersting scenario - instead of running a nation - run an organisation in this Cosmos world - even a criminal one!


5. oh yes - Night and Day - i have sprites for each city at night or during the day. my game was not turn based or real time, but "time-advance" a la Deuteros/Millennium 2.2


6. media - i wanted a bit of humour - so i thought that once your nation reaches the contemprary world there should be comedy newspapers and tv news [a footy game feature].


i can churn out a lot of satisfying graphics without much bother once i get going.


i DO like your political depth - i loved Imperium on Amiga.


7. i have some of my own takes on that too
a general designer section , design your own:

flag, political system, religion, social structure, vehicles/vehicle components - screebshots pending.

more later.

jack

[Mark_Everson]

Re: The case for an overhead view

Hey yellowdaddy, just a few brief comments on your thoughts.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
I like an awful lot of things about this game, but there are one or two things that really have got to go.

You say there are one or two things that "have to go" and give a list of seven things. Which are the doomed elements of our design?

so how many pixels on the world map?
12756 x 6378
81, 357, 768 pixels/game tiles

[or maybe scaled down by a factor of 4 to: 6378 x 3189 = 20,339,442 pixels & game tiles.

Seems utterly impractical unless virtually nothing in the game is specified by game tile. . .

3. the lack of languages

I have always thought we should have 'em but was outvoted earlier. The presence of languages in the game was thought by most to be too much of a detail that wouldn't give the player much bang for the buck.

4. faces. in short, i have a full set of face parts divided into 4 races, enough, i reckon to generate hundres of thousands of unique faces.

This sounds great. We have plans to do something just like this for the character model! But nothing was ever done since the priority was relatively low and the right artist never came along. Can you post some samples on your web page when you get it going?

5. oh yes - Night and Day - i have sprites for each city at night or during the day. my game was not turn based or real time, but "time-advance" a la Deuteros/Millennium 2.2

A nice touch, but it's not clear how such an idea fits into something with a scale like Clash.

i DO like your political depth - i loved Imperium on Amiga.

Glad to hear it, I think that is one of the strongest points of the design!

Cya,

Mark

[yellowdaddy]

complexity is good

hi,

well, using the phrase in it's boradest possible sense i was, most of what i listed is additions, the first 3 are subtractions, but English is the language of the Sasannach so i make no apologies for grammar.
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why is a huge map like this impractical? [more detail]
how much memory or cpu power wiould each tile or this size of make take?!

surely computers nowadays can cope with size more easily?!

a game after all is merely an illusion, there must be ways and means of creating that illusion.

what is the biggest practical map possible?

i appreciate that we're talking about the processing of instructions, and that even using a smaller pallette won't affect things as much as having less instructions to process.

i'm sick of playing on tiny maps with only a few opponents at a time, and simplistic AI. i want to create a real Sim World, play any tribe or nation at any point in time sort of thing, on the same enormous earth map or random map of the same size.

what are your thoughts?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --- - - - - - - - -
the bit about provinces... this relates to above - you talked about only havin a few provinces as economic sub-units. and that having large numbers of small provinces was undesireable.

what about having cosmetic provinces?

take the USA, many provinces but not as many economic units - states like south dakota are really just cosmetic or emotional, and serve no useful purpose in terms of easing administration. the economies are that of the NE, Texas, California, perhaps Seattle-Vancouver [i know it's in canada but...], SE USA, the middle states of America may as well be just grouped as one unit, or divided between the other economic centres.

couldn't this be a potential game feature - where provinces can be a mere cultural overlay on top of an economic reality? that way you could have a USA, and have all the states, but their function would be limited - it reminds me of Europa Universalis a little, with "Centres of Trade".

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languages - i think the case has not been made fully, language can be an attractive and interesting aspect to this kind of game. complexity is good. bigger maps is good, more realism is good. the big software houses will churn out instant gratification pieces, simplistic games, surely the challenge is to make something more complex and rewarding than what you can buy or get copied?

it illustrates in my mind, the divide between the two main types of Strategy/Sim players - those who like to conquer, and those who like to build.

i'm definately the type of player who like to build, to create a world and observe it, and where cosmetic features are an aspect that makes it worthwhile and interesting. just warring all the time can be a little dull.
this is why i detest Command and Conquer and all it's spawn, Age of Empires and the rest - a big turn off.
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the night and day thing is minor - just for when you advance time by hours or days - half the world map goes dark, the other light - but it's pretty pointless unless you want to play in complex operations in a more conventional setting - i.e. a Gulf War scenario, where you might want to only advance time in small units, seconds, minutes or hours.

[Mark_Everson]

Re: complexity is good

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
why is a huge map like this impractical? [more detail]
how much memory or cpu power wiould each tile or this size of make take?!

surely computers nowadays can cope with size more easily?!

As you expect that many squares can be shown in the image with no problem. The issue is the Game Function of those squares. If there are more than say 10,000 squares then what squares actually do in the game needs to be severely limited. Doing many complicated calculations per square, and having the player consider the squares individually becomes increasingly difficult as the number of squares increases.

If squares are just graphical flourishes they really don't interest me very much. (Good graphics aren't to be knocked, but I'm distinguishing between graphical appeal and function here.) I want the squares to have Real game function that the player will at least occasionally interact with. But because of the Clash philosophy to reduce micromanagement players won't be required to deal with things on a square level. There is a whole discussion on what size squares should be, and whether they should be squares or polygons. You can probably find it by searching on "polygon".

what is the biggest practical map possible?

Depends on what the squares do. With our current design something like 10k squares is probably the max practical with current computing power.

what about having cosmetic provinces?

That's doable with our hierarchical management interfaces. Currently they work for managing the economy at civ and province level. We have planned to add regions to that, which would make your aims practical without adding tons of MM.

languages - i think the case has not been made fully, language can be an attractive and interesting aspect to this kind of game. complexity is good. bigger maps is good, more realism is good.

Realism needs to be carefully balanced against playability. We are not trying to make a perfect world simulator, and would obviously fail if we tried. I'm not saying the cutoff for too much realism precludes languages, just that we need to exercise judgement in what to have and what to omit from the game. That said, "sweat equity" gives more votes in the directions that Clash goes in terms of its designs. If you end up being a major contributor I don't think there'd be any problem including language explicitly if that was make-or-break for you.

[yellowdaddy]

i thought you said something like that there would be optional micromanagement - so those who want it can select it, or vice versa.

i'm not too happy with the limits on map size. i would sooner play civ3 of alpha centauri than play a game that had the same or similar sized maps.

is there some kind of ratio or equation to the amount of computing power per tile? It stands to reason that whatever the barriers that exist now, the exponential improvments in computers must surely make huge maps increasingly plausible. yes?

i dunno if just including languages is going to be enough. maybe i'm unrealistic, but i thought that by now using Amiga level graphics a game of vast size would be possible by now. i'm having problems with my ftp, so i'll stick this gif on i knocked up this afternoon of the kind of thing i'm thinking about.

if you can, would you stick it on a post for all to view



jack

[yellowdaddy]

oooh it worked!



this is a rough idea, but one of a few. i can make it a lot smoother and more finished, once i know exactly what the screen has to contain.

anyway - this map - a painstakingly hand drawn bitmap by me no less [because even the juicest graphics progs lack the ease of pixel by pixel drawing on mspaint!] no altitude or biomes on this one.

is an slighty imperfect enlargement of the strategic level 3 map.

each tile - more or less viewable, i hoped could be a tile on he vast world map i'm craving.

9,800 tiles would be 70 x 140 tile world map, in which each tile would be about 180km x 180km, Scotland would be about 2 tiles. terrific! i think anything above 5 times this size would be an improvement, but still a bit unsatisfactory.
what about 638x1276tiles - 814,088? each tile being 20km by 20km.

the face is an example of one of the many [not a pic of me!] based roughly on my face, and altered for each race, and a selection of face types and shapes.

.................................................. .............

so the size and colour content of tiles affects the cpu drain minimally?

what do you want each tile to "do" anyway?

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
i thought you said something like that there would be optional micromanagement - so those who want it can select it, or vice versa.

Sorry, I don't know which statement of mine you are referring to, so I can't respond in detail. MM will be optional as you say.

i'm not too happy with the limits on map size. i would sooner play civ3 of alpha centauri than play a game that had the same or similar sized maps.

Well if super-pixelated maps are that important to you, then Clash is probably not going to be acceptable.

is there some kind of ratio or equation to the amount of computing power per tile? It stands to reason that whatever the barriers that exist now, the exponential improvments in computers must surely make huge maps increasingly plausible. yes?

Some possibilities exist to modify the design to reduce what happens in each square. For now each square has its own dedicated economy that is much more sophisticated than in other games of the genre. That is the primary reason we need to keep the tile number within some bounds. With current game design and increase in computer potential we won't be able to handle a million tiles for about 10 more years. Too bloody long for me to wait.

i dunno if just including languages is going to be enough. maybe i'm unrealistic, but i thought that by now using Amiga level graphics a game of vast size would be possible by now. i'm having problems with my ftp, so i'll stick this gif on i knocked up this afternoon of the kind of thing i'm thinking about.

It is NOT graphics limitations that impose the tile number restrictions. It is the game model of the world, and the processing power required. You want a detailed sim, but seem to think all that world modeling comes for free in terms of computer resources. It doesn't.

Tiles for the world map are supposed to be 100 km on a side. The 10k number was just an order of magnitude value to distinguish what Clash has from the millions of tiles you seem to want. If you want to focus in a scenarios on the British Isles then 10k gets you a fair amount of resolution.


The face is good, I like your approach! Except for the bisecting line, which I assume will be gotten rid of.

-Mark

[yellowdaddy]

i was recalling something i read on the website summary of the game.

ok,

clearly, if you have a world map of whatever size, 70% is going to be sea, and most of that is not goign to require much more than depth and perhaps ecology settings, and so most of the ocean tiles will take less computing power,yes? and perhaps even a small number of the land tiles, high altitude moutains or polar tiles for example, might not be so important in the game, yes?

so will there be a scale of memory consumption per tile type? a laot of ocean squares are surely going to be largely cosmetic in a sense aren't they? [i'm sure this has been brought up before yes?]

how many "more active" tiles and "less active" tiles will there be? and what kind of map size allowance would this enable?

a map of 128 tiles by 256 tiles, would leave around 32,000 total, 30% of which is just under 10,000 - and poor old scotland is reduced to single figures of tiles, och, pog mo haoin!

.....................

, yes the bisectin line is 'cos i'm lazy, and just do half faces and mirror them.

plenty more where that came from

another question - related to size... what is the maximum number of countries at one time you envisage?
[naturally i would like several hundered or a couple of thousand nations and tribes at least! ]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi yellowdaddy:

The 10k number I'm throwing around already includes a derating factor for lack of economic activity for sea, desert, tundra, etc. The current estimate for the number of economically active tiles we can afford is something like 1k-3k. Changes to how the economy works could increase this up to maybe 20k or so economically active tiles. However such changes could result in some weird effects I don't want to go into here.

Another issue with the extremely large number of map squares you want is pathfinding and map AI. There may be workarounds but the current map AI spec increases in complexity as the number of tiles to the fourth power IIRC.

another question - related to size... what is the maximum number of countries at one time you envisage?
[naturally i would like several hundered or a couple of thousand nations and tribes at least! ]

I'd leave all these up to the scenario designer. Off the top of my head maybe 30-100 civs should be doable, and at least hundreds of ethnic groups should be possible.

[Dale]

Mark:

I don't know how java compares with C++ with it's memory useage, but in my game Empire the largest map I've had running is 900x450 (405,000 tiles) with 5 layers. Only the first layer is the graphic register, the rest are the owner layer, unit layer, city layer, economic layer. And my poor old P3-666 can keep up a fairly decent 15 frames per second (who need 60 fps for a TBS??), and the game still only takes up 9.6 meg of RAM (taking off the 18 meg I load onto the graphics card for the DirectX7 surfaces and graphics).

Admittedly it takes up to 15 minutes to generate a random map of that size , but there's no delays in turn changes when things are processed, because most of the game processing is being done on idle clock cycles during the player's turn. No use letting idle clock cycles get away from you just cuz of lazy/slow players.

[LDiCesare]

Just letting know I don't like 2D iso much either and like top views more. But I'd also rather have a hex-based map than a square based map, or a polygon-based map so 'squares' can be any size or shape.
But now I like the nethack UI so maybe I am not the most representative player as far as graphics are concerned.
About C++/java, just forget the differences, there are none worth talking about from the user perspective.
As for the depth of details, Dale, there is a simulation behind each square. (Units are also big (made of elements with their health, experience...). Worse, the ai simulates the world, thus making copies of units etc. temporarily to work with.) That is where the layers of simulation takes place. A square has things like geography/location, civ which controls it, economic information (lots of stuff), ethnic information (population number + proportions of ethnicities).

[yellowdaddy]

an increase in map size could be offset by an increase in autiomated Managers to handle certain aspects of the running of your nation [suits your anti-MM feelings] - after all, the other computer nations are going to be the same sort of thing.
auto-managers mean less processing yes?

i'm getting the sense, despite what was said about dale's map, that maps much bigger than anything in Civ3 are possible whilst still keeping all thge depth your want.

use the force luke!

but come on - can't i win any votes for some kind of Simcity1/Caesar3 North&South/SWIV style city management/arcadebattle-ness... even if it's just a little battle of tiny stick men to watch, or a highy zoomed out simplified city map.

just an 800 x 600 non-movable optional map - depth is one thing, but what about atmosphere! the danger is that the game becomes just a wall of statistics.

two of the most stylish games i think are Millenium 2.2 and Deuteros - simple, rough graphicky old amiga games yes, but what atmosphere, a combination of subtle sound effects, interesting stylised graphics and nice little features... more playable than most of the generic AOE/C&C-type [or Civ] that comes out.

votes please gentlemen!