Grid system

[Meh]

As long as it is hard and slow...

Like you have to log in every turn to go trackless unless your following someone...

And people remember that even to build on grassland requires that you remove the grass.

Making it hard to settle off road would be enough of a determent to keep many in the existing places.

Then boats could land anywhere. Think of the settlement attempts on this contient. If your boat can only land where people are it makes it too easy to discover people or good places to settle.

Roanoke was a swamp basically. Had they only been able to land on easy spots connected to a path system the first colony wouldn't have died off.

So it is back to a grid. A big grid of locations. But no little grid within a location. Yes?

You can only easily go where you have already been or you can be lead? Yes?

[griogal]

And to navigate...some new tools : the compass, the sextant, etc.

Although a good woodsman could navigate into the mountains (thanks to some bushcraft tricks) without a compass....and without proper equipment as well.

[Siphersh]

The point of the new grid system that Jos is talking about is really to add more freedom of movement. Instead of having to go to five different place before getting to another place like for example Quillanoi and Siom you can build just one long continous road between the two instead of having to stop at Lake Village then Reniov Mountains... See my point?

What are the social relevancies of building new connections between cities? We get there faster? Well, that's what road-improvement is about. We can circumnavigate enemy cities? If we just simply had many minor locations with no (or little) resources, and minor paths connecting them, we had plenty of strategic planning and all the stuff that comes with that. Or is it that you stand stalled at the first location en route if you're not logged in? Well, first of all: always the awake one should drive. And if you're alone, or walking, you can at least have some time to practice social behaviour with the locals. And you know what's good about that? This way you can perhaps realize that you already have your "roadside inn", but you just simply refuse to use it to it's fullest. Why do you travel that far? Are you a traveler? Why not interested then in the villages in between? Or do you visit a friend? Why not send her a message, and meet in between? That could make tourism in the "roadside inn" go up. And in case you're a messenger or transport something, then I would like to draw your attention to the main economic relevance of a "roadside inn": it's a trading post. You don't need to travel that far, if you can arrange it in another way. Do no other people live at or frequent those locations in between? Of course, if you are a secret agent, who takes a message, that can not be entrusted to anyone, that's different.

So, I don't think that it's a problem that you have to stop at the locations in between. I don't see any kind of social development, that would be restricted by this non-grid system, and allowed or promoted by a grid-system.

But you have to understand: I'm telling all this from the perspective of promoting and maintaining the functioning and developing of social reality and social life of Cantr. I am not at least interested in playing sim city, or a first person shooters, or WarCraft, just to mention those which are to be integrated into Cantr by this grid-system-thing... Eheh...

This scarcity of land... I don't understand this really. What is the problem with simply limiting the flow of resources within the current system? Plus my favourite minor locations, some of them with some little resources, to fight for. If you have a "forelocation" only at those, where you can only build watchtower, and stuff, but no real town-buildings, it would be interesting to defend that.

But come on... "some real borders"... You don't really think that a border is real because there is physical wall there...! "Great Wall of Ladvicitavoi" ... Create a map, draw a line, and there you have your border. It cannot get no more "real" than that. If you fortify your towns, you have your "border" in a military sense as well. You know what? Actually, it's the grid system in which you can not have your defense line. Enemy can always infiltrate in between the towns. If grid system, in a critical political situation we could have tons of characters, who are a) building a wall across the road between two locations b) trying to destroy that same wall c) walking at slug speed crosscountry, trying to go round the wall, d) walking crosscountry for years, to travel in between fortified towns, ractangular to a road. There are many kids, who would love this game. The only problem they would have is that it's too slow. And all the others can just try to find out what's going on. That's not a real border. That's a mess, nay?

[Meh]

So I agree with you on not having a grid within a location.

And if I read correctly, I agree with you on having many minor locations. I just envision it as being a grid of locations sized grid spaces with the anchor points for chracters to deal with travel.

[creepyguyinblack]

So will certain squares within the grid be designated as useable in only certain ways? So that within a forest, there will only be a few "open" squares that allow for buildings, machines, or perhaps certain types of farming, but out in the plains, there will be many open squares. A desert would have mostly just ones for sand and so on? Will the amount of resources available be more varied as well since locations will more or less merge and flow into eachother so midway between a place with potatos and a place with corn, you may find plots of both scattered about?

[Meh]

IMO most new locations will have "sqaures" or "slots" that are unbuildable without being cleared first. Like finding a firm foundation under the sand. Also most new locations would only have their "cover" resource like sand, stone, or wood. If you clear a slot of sand, grass, stone, wood, or marsh it may reveal a resource. If you clear all the covering resource the convering resourse is gone.

You could just store/imagine large shapes of where the resources are that may span locations. And if your close enough to it you can see it and get it. Allowing them to overlap and reduce the number of entries possibly.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

Today you can walk between two towns without getting lost. You should be able to bypass towns in the middle too. This could be done by offering as a choice of path ever town that is connected to the town or path your on plus everytown that is connected to that set.

how about instead of being able to go to any town that is connected by the road system(we'd have a list of every single town on the island to choose from logivally) how about we have sign's that can be interacted with. when a person return's from a town they have been to they can adjust the sign to include the name of the new town they have visited. this should only work for up to a set number of towns away. so the first doesn't happen and then you could leap frog travel across an island instead of having to go town by town. plus then it would pay doubly to explore since then you'd have more places to go. to start witn but have it so that you can just follow a path. when you hit a cross road's or a town you stop like now.

[Meh]

What I countered myself with four hours after that will work better.

You have a pesonal list of where you visited and if you have visited the place beyond a stopping point you do not have to stop there anymore.

But you are still visible as you pass by.

Maps and signs will only help you make those one turn jumps the right way to get you were you are going.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

IMO most new locations will have "sqaures" or "slots" that are unbuildable without being cleared first. Like finding a firm foundation under the sand. Also most new locations would only have their "cover" resource like sand, stone, or wood. If you clear a slot of sand, grass, stone, wood, or marsh it may reveal a resource. If you clear all the covering resource the convering resourse is gone.

You could just store/imagine large shapes of where the resources are that may span locations. And if your close enough to it you can see it and get it. Allowing them to overlap and reduce the number of entries possibly.

i like the clear land idea. maybe have forested squares as unbuildable and impassable but can be cleared(tools would make it faster) and maybe leveling an area to build a house on aswell(tools help here too). so if you want to build a house you have to clear the land then level the land first. this will stop nuisance building's appearing in places.and better tolls will make it faster to do this. companies could appear for constructing houses and buildings. you give them your plan and tell them where you want it and they build it. maybe to find resources like limestone and the such in new area's you have to prospect a set of grid location's. if it's going to be a program on out pc's we could just hit the prospect button then highlight the squares we want to check over. it takes time to check and once you've done the squares in your free move area you move anchor point's to the new place.if your doing a wood gathering prject you click gather button and high light the square of wood's you want to gather from. maybe makie it so that only a few squares into the woods can be gathered. food would be the same with wild crop's growing in an area but have the option of farming squares. bring in fences so that with out a fence wild animal's will wonder into your farm if your not nearby and eat your crop's. be able to tend farm block's so that you get a better yeaild from your work. this would mean we could also transport plants to other location's. different square types would have different yeild values. a grassy plain square would yeild highly but a rocky square would be lower and a desert square would be mext to nothing. so good farming land would be sought after and char's could buy and sell land which had value. dig different square out so that you can get to the resources burried there liie mines and the such the possibilities are endless.

[Jos Elkink]

Spectrus_Wolfus, most of your suggestions are indeed very close to what I am planning / working on.

Indeed, land will have to be cleared before you can build or farm; forest cannot be build on, but you can, with more effort than in grass areas, and with wood as byproduct, clear that land as well.

I like the ideas of free travelling in mountains with the right tools, at a much slower pace. Good thinking ... That allows for free travelling, while the mountains will still form a physical barrier, and you won't be able to build a highway straight across, but it also allows for more exploration (rare, hard to find resources?) or Swiss-like armies ...

For all clearity: I am not talking about grids within locations, but about the whole map being one grid. The concept of locations will disappear, except that towns are likely to be situated where there are currently locations.

It is not my intentional to slow down walking within towns. That would be annoying. That's the whole reason for this mechanism of an anchor point, which makes free movement in a limited area possible, without being able to walk freely everywhere. Of course, in bigger towns this would still mean that it takes time to reach the other side, but that's not necessarily a problem, and it wouldn't take that much extra time, either. And ideally, if technically possible, I'd have the travelling being processed more often than currently the case, so the minimum travelling time shouldn't be 3 real-life hours.

Siphersh, you spend a lot of time explaining that many of those improvements can be done without grid, but I am really not arguing against you on that point ... Yes, it can, but it can also be done with a grid ... What you really did not convince me of yet is that so much would be lost with a grid. Indeed, I do not want to change Cantr from a social interaction game into a simcity or first-shooter game. There are enough of those already. But I think there are crucial differences between those games and Cantr that are not affected by implementing a grid, namely that in all those games, the game defines the social/economic/political/monetary/etc. environment and what kind of roles you can play; in Cantr all this is developed by the characters. That, I think, is crucial, and that is not in any sense affected by the grid.

When I talk to Sico about my plans - we often talk on the phone about Cantr - he has very similar doubts like you have. But he was less worried when I explained to him that you see the maps from the top - so 2d, not 3d - and that it will always be somewhat 'abstract'. So it would leave enough space for your own imagination to fill in the details.

Although I can see some of your points - the larger spread of small groups of characters and the more time it takes to construct instead of play socially - and I will think about them, I cannot see that introducing a grid will change the fundamentals on which Cantr is based. And I think that what you get in return is really quite interesting.

And, well, a SimCity, with the details of The Sims, with the perspective of a First-Shooter Game, but with all characters played by the players (no AI characters) and all social institutions defined by the players ... sounds pretty cool, no? :p Those games lack freedom, which is the main problem (I love The Sims for their graphics and how you can build things etc., but I get bored within a few hours, whereas I can play Cantr for years), and that really is not affected and more likely increased, by introducing a grid.

And thanks for clarifying the globalisation issue. It is something that I do think about, and did from the start. It has always been a bit difficult balancing to create a game that is interesting to play when you are completely new in an empty area (as at the start), but that is still cool to play once ships, airplanes, etc. are widely available. That's tricky to reach, but that's the attempt ... But thanks for making clear that this is a completely separate discussion, not related to the grid ...

[Jos Elkink]

Oh, just for clarification:

The fact that so little is defined in Cantr, that the world is so large, that there is something like a capital rule, etc., are all conscious and fundamental design decisions when creating Cantr; the fact that Cantr is a textbased game with locations and connections, instead of impressive 3D graphics, sounds, and a large grid on which everything takes place, has never been a design decision, but was only because I was not able to do otherwise. I like the technical skills and time for the 3D stuff, and I could not get my head around a system that has both a detailed grid and still a very large world. The latter issue I solved, and hence I am now implementing it. Most of my ideas about Cantr before I wrote it involved grids, and they all resulted in definitions of the world that are way too big, and only when I found the solution of locations I started writing.

Anyway, I'm losing the short/clear point I wanted to make ... But you see my point.

[Siphersh]

Jos, I think I've explained my major anti-grid arguments, that's the most I can predict in that direction.

To be honest, I just think that it's too much of a work to create the code. Let's assume that you have it finished: the testing phase would be a very enormous task. I don't believe, that anyone has the software-development resources on this planet that's needed for creating this kind of v2.0 as a _free_ game. It must be a gigantic programming work, and I still don't really believe, that it wouldn't eat up much more processor time. But I don't even know the present code, so I don't know. I just don't want to have this project go Sissy-fussy, if you know what I mean. It is just so much more work than developing this present system to an equally functional (actually, in my opinion effectively _better_) level. I don't say that a grid system would definately be worse than this present game (although I see great risk, simply because of the unpredictibility of an entirely new system), but I think, that with the improvements similar to my examles this game could _become_ better than any grid-system, with much less programming work, and gradually, so that it is always remains adjustable. I would be glad to have you work on this game, and not something else, that's all. (Selfish, aye?)

You are like a traveller, who goes into a cavern, finds some treasure, and starts to spend it away large, because he thinks that every cavern holds such treasures. That is: the gods must like you very much indeed, that you've coded the way you did, and created Cantr II. This game is close to being a wonder. I don't believe that anyone thought this would be possible. And now you'd like to rewrite the code, and hope that the game won't change that much? You can't tell that. You cannot predict that. I can very easily imagine, that you would create a grid-system, test it, then transfer the Cantr World just to find out, that it doesn't work, and then we can go phylosophic about why this simple 1.0 was so wonderously functionable.

The real question is not if under a grid-system characters would live a really lively social life or not. The real question is: how in the holy hecker is it possible, that characters live such a lively social life in this present game at all?? You take it for granted. It is not. It is a wow on the 10th power. Haven't you noticed, that there are no similar games on the net? In the 21th century, with millions and millions of people involved in the internet... I think, when you found the solution of locations, you've found one factor that makes Cantr work. The definitions of the World getting too big is only one point. There must be many factors that contributes to the functionality of Cantr that we are not aware of.

I pondered over the possible explanations, and I feel that a grid system is just exactly what is able to strip Cantr of everything that makes it such functionable. But that is not much more than a feeling. What I know is that noone can predict that exactly. I hope, that you will test it very thoroughly, in case there will be a grid system. It's too big of a change, too risky. That's something against it. One more thing against it: it is a very demanding work to code it, test it, adjust it, test it, rewrite it, set it up, then stop it to test it again, then rewrite, then set it up again, just to find out that in the meantime the players have gone. Loads of work, anyway.

Now, all we have to do is find something _for_ a grid system, and check if it's worth the work and the risk. That's why I am trying to show possible improvements to this present system, which in my opinion are not worse, than a grid-system solution. All I say is that we simply do not have anything _pro_ grid-system here. Or, when discussing pros and cons, alongside pros there tend to come up more severe cons. So, I don't say that social life would be severely impaired for sure. That is a possibility, but not a definate con. Definate cons are: great risk because of the lack of graduality, and the amount of programming work.

With a grid system, Cantr would be fun to play. Less because of social issues, and more because of other issues.

OK, I should stop arguing agaist a grid system, I seem to repeat myself. I hope that you don't spend all your time on the grid-system, and that you will have time to improve this present system.

[quote="Jos">I love The Sims for their graphics and how you can build things etc., but I get bored within a few hours, whereas I can play Cantr for years), and that really is not affected and more likely increased, by introducing a grid.</quote]

I don't think so either, of course. OK, maybe I am too scared of changes. Maybe Cantr will be just a tiny little bit worse with a grid system than it is today. I don't know, really.

I would like to be enthusiastic for the grid system, it sounds so cool. I'm trying to convert, but I just cannot find one single feature of the grid system that would have more pros then cons in terms of social life on Cantr. Will you please help me find one?

Designing 2d structures in a grid is just too much fun. I'd probably spend much-much more time walking around, and consequently less time with social issues, I'm afraid. I don't know. Maybe not.

Btw, I am very ambiguous about the grid system. It's just I am contantly trying to convert myself, and ultimately I just write down the counterarguments. I hope, that this scepticism can do good to the whole project.

[Jos Elkink]

Siphersh, that was a really nice reply

Yes, rewriting Cantr is a rather daunting task, that is true. And it will take a lot of time. But I do think that Cantr needs to be rewritten, even if we would not drastically change any concepts, simply because the present system shows more and more problems due to getting too large. The server is getting slower and slower, and we have more and more often problems in the database. I'm hoping that a rewrite would solve this.

There is also a more egoistic reason. Programming on the current version is not overtly challenging at the moment. I know how PHP works and how the database works, and it's simply a matter of just writing some additional pages / forms / etc. to introduce something. Rewriting the game into Java, using a graphical system, and attempting to move as much processing power as possible to the client instead of the server, is a completely new challenge and it is thus much more exciting for me to spend time on than on the current version. To maintain a free game, you need maintainers that are enthousiast ...

Although I still really like the grid idea, and as I said, I liked it better even before I wrote the current version, I do take your critique very seriously. That is, I will think hard about how it can affect gameplay in a negative sense and what we can do about it. I might ask you later on as one of the testers, so you can say what you think ... I plan to create a small group of selected testers who will have to play the game for a while before we transfer the existing one. I will announce when I need people for that and than people can apply.

It is interesting to think about what makes Cantr work and what makes it unique. I do, indeed, think that Cantr is unique at the moment on the internet. I have checked out many games, and all of them are more structured than is Cantr. Did you read my pages about our old lego game? Also on that game, I often tried to figure out what made it so unique. And when I talk to others, I often hear "Yes, I did something similar" and then when I ask for details, it appears not to be that similar after all, because it's always either very structured (specific roles, mechanisms, etc.) or player against player, not character against character (the capital rule, basically). I think it is the freedom that makes Cantr so interesting - some people like playing explorers, others like playing politicians, others hate politicians, but like playing love affairs, other like playing killers, etc. etc. - and all of those people like Cantr. That, I think, is quite unique ... And that, I think, is not affected by changing to a grid or anything.

I see your point about spending time on building instead of on social interaction. And, as I said, I take it very seriously. But as a small counter argument: social interaction has to be about *something*. You can just drop a lot of characters together on a location and surely they'll interact at some point, much like people at a busstop when the bus is extremely late, eventually they'll start talking. But that's not really interesting to simulate ... It gets more interesting when there are things at stake. Things that are at stake in the current game have usually to do with technological progress. In real life, main things at stake are also land property and revenues of those lands. In fact, most of the world history seems to be about that. I think that a grid system will strengthen this element of the game.

Anyway, 'nough said ...

[The Hunter]

It gets more interesting when there are things at stake. Things that are at stake in the current game have usually to do with technological progress. In real life, main things at stake are also land property and revenues of those lands. In fact, most of the world history seems to be about that. I think that a grid system will strengthen this element of the game.

Yep. Actually, I like the building things stuff. The Dutch area still isn't as advanced as the much older English area's and it's fun to build up a company, experiment, etc. It's a goal in my char's life. In general i think the Dutch location is much more interesting to play in as everything is still new and needs to be set up.

Also I can't understand how someone can be opposed to new the game advancing and new possibilities introduced. The grid system promises a lot, especially more freedom. Many things have to be rediscovered, rebuilt, replanned, which gives a new impulse to the char's social interaction. My Coimpany owner char has to plan continiously. Trade with travellers who might have much needed resources, planning expeditions for materials, borrowing tools from others, setup trade deals, etc. It all keeps him busy. Also, the political aspect in the game will be much more important. Sofar, politics were mainly limited to the town itself, but with the grid system, "international" politics will become a lot more important as coorperation will be needed, or, even better, other towns might become a threat. Inh any case, politics will become ever more important I think.

Anyway. Changes may not always be for the good, but standing still is always bad.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

i have to agree about the new areas being more fun to play.my most fun char's are on the aki island(i did have 4 until animal's attacked) and sure it is fun sliding into a sructured area and just being one of the everyday bogun's who struggles to get ahead but it's more of a challenge to get ahead when you have to bring the rest of the char's in the area with you.when nobody has anything it's much more important to work as a community then it is when you can always just buy or borrow it from someone.

back on opic but everything i've seen jos say so far makes me want the new cantr to happen faster. bring on the newness