Skip to main content

Galliventurer - Dreaming of a Universe

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting.

We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game).




Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why.

In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues. 
  1. Prewarming the generation of the dynamically generated universe
  2. Mapping terrain tiles to a spheroidish shape
    1. traversal becomes an issue here (will there be giant bumps where tiles meet at the end caps??)
    2. Can I have the terrain tiles laid flat and then "move the terrain" around instead of the actual player object moving 🤔😬
  3. Making world's have enough "stuff" to be interesting but not every planet should be worth exploring for it's vegetation & fauna, after all our own galaxy has 8/9 planetoids with only one supporting complex life (that we know of at least)
  4. Space is gigantic stretches of nothingness - how can travelling be fun without being too overloading with aliens etc.
Basically it all stems from problem 1. How to have some of the universe pre-generated, so when you plop down in a random sector at the start of the game there isnt a massive wait time for the game to generate and load that sector. 

Enter galliventurer.com where the function(s) for kicking off the generation of the game universe will be connected to a site that people (mainly me at first I guess) can provide a nudge to generating and "discovering" a portion of the universe!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knowledge is Power - Society is Weak

Never more true than today, knowledge is power. Or more aptly in today's world the ability to provide & control the flow of knowledge is power. Recently there's been several large course corrections occur, several years too late but hey, better late than never as the saying goes. This highlights one of the biggest and most major flaws with the way we consume information on the internet. Social media, for good and for ill, is now a major source of information and "news" for millions of people across the planet. There are countless examples of the way that misinformation & even disinformation is created, spread and broadcast across the web. None more prevalent & far reaching than social media. Social media disarms in a way that in person discussion & social interaction previously couldn't. If you heard a story in person that even one or two people could corroborate it would be easy to accept as true, or just as easily refuted by the same small number...

Genetic Revert & Refresh

The premise is pretty simple, what if we could press the undo button for DNA related aflictions. It's a sound theory but whether it would actually work or not is questionable. The possibilities! This particular train of thought was mostly born from thinking about cancerous cells, which grow out of control due to a minute mutation in the DNA of a cell. The immune system doesn't identify the cancerous cells as something that is dangerous because they're near identical to any other healthy cell. The same could be said with aging, cells slowly mutating & loss of elasticity cause degradation in copying the genetic information to new cells. CRISPR gene editing theoretically allows us to alter DNA in a live organism. With this technique the ability to alter a DNA sequence needs only the desired information payload to be spliced in. This obviously raises rather large ethical concerns of being able to wildly alter people's DNA and fundamentally change the human genome. Whi...

How to Think

Moving an arm and thinking about moving an arm are two vastly different things. Even thinking about thinking about moving an arm is a natural thing to do even if reading it is very odd. Now the hard part, how to you design thinking ? The deliberate process of simulating scenarios to either logical or illogical ends would seem like a great fit for computers that can do millions of calculations a second. The slow an deliberate winding down a thought path seems to be the missing link to truely intelligent machines. We are very good at making machines. Even more so machines that actually produce things and have purpose. Since the earliest primitive forms of man, our tools are defined by their use. Or more aptly by the end result they achieve. So what is the end result of smart machines? To drive our cars, build our structures, do the heavy lifting and manage our lives? To do all that the ability to compute and apply action is needed but not actual thought. Most business tools and modern ap...