Road Descriptions

[Agar]

What? Who cares about that?

Well, I'll get to that.

This idea is a simple one that can evolve into something rather worthwhile. Just a nice easy Eyeball icon by the roads to get a description of it.

"You see the Quillanoi Road, travelling from Quillanoi (east) to Shambon. It travels east-south-east and is well maintained."

Well maintained would be has no improvments available or improvments unfinished. Under construction would be a road that has an improvment project in progress. Neglected would be a road with an improvment available but no initiated yet.

Unless the programmers or other higher powers decide these should have effects on travel times, these descriptions are merely colorful.

The other aspects of this idea are already in game. Road name. Road direction. No extra programming there. (i'm looking out for ya guys)

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Here's where the idea can evolve several ways.

First, the characters would need a range of sight. This would be universal, an amount arbitrarily decided on by the people who have ideas about how far thing are apart.

Once characters can see further down the road, they can see the other end of the road. Not the town, it's buildings or people, but maybe the signs of life that are evident from a distance. Like smoke.

Now there are different kinds of smoke. It can be thin, or thick, light, or dark. Different activities produce different smoke. Cooking in a fire pit would yield light, thick smoke. Cooking in an oven produces light, thin smoke. Primitive Smelting Furnace use would bellow out dark, thick smoke, but a Smelting Furnace would be more efficent and make dark thin smoke.

That lets you have an idea of some of the activities and advancment of neighboring areas. If more than one thing is in use, you would see more than one instance of the smoke. Like:

"You see the Quillanoi Road, travelling from Quillanoi (east) to Shambon. It travels east-south-east and is well maintained. In the distance, you see 2 light, thin trails of smoke and 1 dark, thick trails of smoke."

I.E. two fire pits and a primitive smelting furnace with people working on them right now.

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The further evolution of smoke is of course, the smoke signal.

This would require it to be machinery to be built that can contain the fire and can regulate the fire.

Stone, about twice as much as is needed for a cooking pit, possibally more to contain the fire.

To regulate the fire, you need something you can dampen so as not to have it catch fire, but also be managable enough to be moved by a single person. Hide drys out to quick, furs singe, silk is to light, hemp or cotton might work. The amount used in a long coat, multiplied by about 4 or 5, should be adequate.

That's just to make the machinery. It should require a trowel, since you'll need cloth to make the blanket anyway, you should have enough iron left laying around to make a trowel too. There should also either be only 1 able to be built in each location, otherwise, several people could be trying to talk at once, and who knows what they will say.

To use the Smoke Signal, you would need wood, obviously, but also water, to dampen the blanket each time. 2 - 3 times the wood to use a fire pit, and as much water as they feel is neccesary.

Send a Smoke Signal project should have no repeats. You send the signal, and if you have more to say, you do it again. To set it up easy, make it a one day project, that is 8 ticks. When you start the project, there are 8 unmarked radio buttons, each one representing a puff. Selecting a radio button will produce a puff on the tick.

When people look at the roads, the can see the puffs and gaps.

What those puffs and gaps mean is up to the people in each town. There could be signals for "thief headed your way", or "we need food", or "merchant passing through" or anything else they want. They just need to build the smoke signal, and then talk and agree on what signal means what.

After a day, the signal dissappears. The whole thing can dissappear all at once, or the puffs can fade out one by one. It's a simple push stack thing, easy to key to a tick.

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The whole point of the Smoke Signal is to encourage people to leave thier towns. They can't just call a friend, they have look for and understand the signal. So first they have to get out and establish what the signals mean. Then, as towns have shops that need more employees, they can call to the other towns for workers, as thieves lift things off the ground, guards the next town over can mobalize to intercept, as traders pass through, customers in the next town can prepare to barter for goods.

More inter-town cooperation, inter-town activity, more society to establish.

[SekoETC]

Wow, that really would bring a whole new dimension to the game. And it wouldn't even take much coding.

Edit Nevermind, I skipped a sentence.

[AoM]

Neat Idea. I don't know about how easy or difficult it would be for the programmers, but in theory, it sounds like a wonderful addition to the game.

Would you be able to do similar things with the light in a light house for ships at sea?

~AoM

[Antichrist_Online]

I think the code for person descriptions could be transferred to make the road descriptions and smoke signals are a really good idea, as they allow communication but on the cantr time scale (takes a long time to make one message.)

Edited to answer Industrialists post: I ment using the percentage heath system as a building block for the road descriptions, liking the percentage to the completion of the road. I built a similar game to cantr along time ago (LAN stoneage game as an IT project) and used a similar method, however I had a freind programming the game, so I might be talking rubbish.

[The Industriallist]

In a way this ought to be two topics, but I like both suggestions.

Smoke signals offer something vaguely like the telegraph function without requiring troublesome added technology. And they wouldn't be able to fully replace either regular post or possible future telegraph services.

Editiononal note: I'm not in the programming department, nor do I know much about the game code, but it seens to me that a lot of people make a lot of unfounded (and I think wrong) assumtions about code reuse and the like.

[Agar]

I don't know how cantr is coded, or assume they can cut and paste some code to make this easy, but it does fit in well with cantr.

It takes a whole day to send the smoke signal. The signal would then be visible for a while, but if no one is looking for it, no one will see it. It requires different types of resources that require most locations to travel to gather. And once built, it requires the builders to travel to establish what the signal means. Even then, communication would be rather onesided without another smoke signal on the other end, so the process would be repeated all over again.

All and all, a lot more traveling, communicating and trade.

We want that, right?