Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

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Do you like the idea of guided spawning?

Yes - I like the proposal given
57
73%
Yes - I like the idea, but not so much the suggestions given
11
14%
I Might like the idea. I need to read more.
4
5%
No - sounds like a bad idea
5
6%
I don't give a crap
1
1%
 
Total votes: 78
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HFrance
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby HFrance » Sun Mar 03, 2013 9:14 pm

It is not a question of language. My english is the worst of all here in this forum. It is a matter of model of game. There is nothing in the mechanics of Cantr allowing talk of birth, fertility, procreation, family, contraception, etc.. When we speak of the system based on desire, not talking on the desire of the characters, but the desire of the player community at every location. It's a players/location desire-based system.
Cantr II is a social simulator. What is not working is due a problem in the society.
Cantr is like Vegas - what happens in the game should be in the game.
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EchoMan
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby EchoMan » Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:48 pm

The gene system does actually make newspawns somewhat resemble their "parents" in the location, but beyond than that you are correct.
guy_fawkes
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Re: Spawn on a new island?

Postby guy_fawkes » Mon Jun 23, 2014 4:56 am

Im not sure I follow the concept. Are you suggesting that each time you make a new character it spawns on a seperate island? Cause if that is what your considering, count me in! That sounds very good!
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Bmot
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Re: Spawn on a new island?

Postby Bmot » Mon Jun 23, 2014 12:33 pm

guy_fawkes wrote:Im not sure I follow the concept. Are you suggesting that each time you make a new character it spawns on a seperate island? Cause if that is what your considering, count me in! That sounds very good!


Only if you tick the box ;) So, it's not automatic, just possible.
Richard Dawkins wrote:We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
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Bmot
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Re: Configurable Spawning

Postby Bmot » Fri Jul 04, 2014 10:50 am

Merged topics about "desire based spawning"
Richard Dawkins wrote:We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
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*Wiro
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby *Wiro » Fri Jul 04, 2014 10:59 am

There's dozens of islands, yet all my characters spawn on Treefeather. Every. Single. Time. :( I guess I'm lucky, at least, that it's my favourite island.
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kicking jay
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby kicking jay » Fri Jul 04, 2014 2:01 pm

*Wiro wrote:There's dozens of islands, yet all my characters spawn on Treefeather. Every. Single. Time. :( I guess I'm lucky, at least, that it's my favourite island.


Same, but it's my second least favorite!

I really, really prefer the smaller islands.
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Elros
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby Elros » Mon Jul 14, 2014 1:52 pm

Yeah, any status on this?
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ObsessedWithCats
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby ObsessedWithCats » Fri Dec 05, 2014 6:00 pm

What form of this exactly has been accepted, or is that not figured out yet?

I feel like some variation on this could maybe pull the game out of the slump I've been seeing lately - there's nothing more demoralising than spawning a new character on the same small island half your other characters are already on, in a town full of sleepers, where all sensible escape options will take years to work out (during which you'll have to tiptoe around your other characters) and there's no other IC-sensible response for your new character that wont bring them in way too much contact with your existing characters. I've never considered killing a character straight off the bat before but it's starting to look like the only workable option here, and as much as I dislike the town I don't want to do that to them or to my character who I've put effort into thinking up.

And then on the flip side I've another town where they've resources and work to offer to easily three or four newspawns as-is, with more wakeful and active characters than sleepyville above, but because their wakeful citizens are all of their citizens which is less than a third of sleepyville's population they've not had a newspawn in as long as I can remember.

[/rant]

So yeah, I think this is something not just nice but really important, and I was wondering if any progress has been/is being/is expected to be made on it. We need something at least besides 'how many people are alive' (and whatever current distance-to-other-characters limit) to be determining spawn locations, and it might as well have some element of player preference on either or both end(s).
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Bmot
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby Bmot » Sun Oct 25, 2020 10:18 pm

Just figured I'd add this here:

https://forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 76#p594575

zymurge wrote:I wonder how much of this recent malaise with spawned characters is caused by the new spawning algorithm. My theory is this:

The well established towns are established because they've been around for a long time, have pretty much all of the resources and facilities they'll ever need, and have settled into doing busy work to maintain food and stocks. The people there in charge have been around for decades and have established a nice stable status quo. The town centers essentially become social circles and people hang out to mostly just chat in RP persona while doing their busy work. Because there's a lack of urgency for survival and little opportunity to advance the towns, there's a lot of inertia for change.

Add in the new spawning algorithm that heavily favors dropping spawns into towns with lots of conversation. That means most spawns end up in place described above. The big towns have become kind of meh about their newspawns, because so many of them lose interest and die. Players don't really want to invest in forming new relationships until the spawn shows that they going to hang around and add some color. This culminates in the point to the bucket and let's see what you got greeting.

It's become a death spiral. Too many spawns in big cities mean low investment in the spawn because of low life expectancy. Too little attention on the spawn causes the player to lose interest and abandon the character, thus fueling the first issue.

The solution is to provide less spawns to the established towns. Make them rarer and something that the towns will have a vested interest in. That higher level interaction will entice more players to keep their characters there. Meanwhile, more spawning into the frontier areas will give players a different set of survival goals and hopefully increase their desire to stick around. Those that want to be in bigger towns can do enough to gather basic survival gear and then find a way to a bigger town. At that point, they've invested enough in these characters to keep them alive once in the larger town.

To summarize all of this with a practical suggestion, I think there's essentially a few different preferences for players starting new characters:
  1. I want to spawn in a thriving place where I can focus on RP with an active group
  2. I want to spawn in a small town where there's much to do and a few people to do it with
  3. I want to live on the edge and spawn in place where I've got frontier level work to do just to survive
  4. I want to roll with what life throws me, so totally random

So here's the crazy idea. Give the player a choice between those options at character creation time. Then the algorithm can find a fitting spot. This works because part of RPing your character is to define the type of setting that they want to start in. We already typically preselect things like names, life goals, back story, personality type, etc so picking their spawn setting isn't a stretch. Also, by allowing the player to pick, that reduces some of the cases where a player doesn't like the spawn situation and abandons the character because of that.
Richard Dawkins wrote:We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
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Black Canyon
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby Black Canyon » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:00 pm

I voted! However, I may have voted twice...back in 2012 and now in 2020. :P

It seems like it's been a consistently popular idea.
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PaintedbyRoses
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Re: Desire-Based Spawning (DBS)

Postby PaintedbyRoses » Mon Oct 26, 2020 9:02 pm

Bmot wrote:Just figured I'd add this here:

https://forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 76#p594575

To summarize all of this with a practical suggestion, I think there's essentially a few different preferences for players starting new characters:
  1. I want to spawn in a thriving place where I can focus on RP with an active group
  2. I want to spawn in a small town where there's much to do and a few people to do it with
  3. I want to live on the edge and spawn in place where I've got frontier level work to do just to survive
  4. I want to roll with what life throws me, so totally random
I think we need a new voting thread so we can vote on these choices presented by Bmot.
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