21-03-2001 07:24									#61
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Great Progress Gary! I would comment on the tags, but I just got back from playing raquetball with the guy who always whups my a**, and I haven't got two brain cells to rub together... So I'm afraid if I tried I'd do more harm than good

	21-03-2001 08:20									#62
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Tags are a part of this model alone.

As to if they are researchareas, in a way i guess you could say that, but they are more. When a farmer farms his land, he produces RP simply by farming and most of that RP is tagged for Agricultural and depending on the farm, Herding...mayby a slight amount for biology. This doesn't mean he reasearched anything, he just did his job and he learns stuff by doing it he can pass on to his children and friends. He may find that if you plant at this date rather than this, its better, but its purely accidental.

Most of the RP generated as you've read goes into upkeep....which Rich, BTW have you gotten a good mesaurement on how it should decrease point wise if you don't have enough?

	21-03-2001 08:44									#63
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Well, I can't think of another good name. They are used for the interface, RP generation, and links with other models. You can think of them as "Affect Areas" if that helps. Their interconnection with other models is not yet defined fully, and as part of the "black box" philosophy they don't have to be. They are a concise way of passing data back and fourth between the tech model and other models.

Yes, they are supposed to be a part of the tech creator GUI. My forgetfulness is the sole cause of them not being in the earlier request.

Under the settings in the spreadsheet, the tech will fall by about a level a turn when there are no RP's at all. So if something is totally stagnant for tech turns, you lose kalf the knowledge you once had. I think that is reasonable.

By the way, I'd like to make the mose recent versions of the spreadsheets available to everyone. There haven't been any mechanics changes, but I made them easier to use and hopefully fixed the problem caused by the conversion from the older program. How do I get thhe new ones posted on the website?

	21-03-2001 15:35									#64
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Just a coding question. Gary, did Mark give you the game.data.military.TechRequirement file?
This is what I use in the Military code to simulate the effect of better tech giving better stats to an army. (I found that somewhere in the web, but was it in tech pages or some thread, I don't remember)
You may want to check it. Basically it means I need to know for one or more tech(s) for a civ/techlevel, given a "requirement" (you said buzzword?) to build a unit, how much %age I get to enhance my unit stats.
Any feedback on that file is welcome since it never got used, I just know it doesn't crash the system.

	21-03-2001 17:47									#65
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Laurent: I did mention that to Gary, and he has the last version I received.

Richard: To get it on the web page put a note in the Web Site Requests Discussion page, and then email it to Dom. Probably duplicating the post in the email is a good idea since Dom prefers to get everything by mail if possible.

	22-03-2001 01:15									#66
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Thanks for the input everybody!

I have prowled around the material for things relevant to technology, so am a little better informed.

The usage for tags does rather appear to be to implement the "Object" that is passed as an argument to an Observer (something that implements the Observer interface). In that case we might well call it "ObservationType". I wouldn't have any problem with that, and it has the possibility of having (at a later stage) quite complicated "tags" with functionality of their own. That would probably make the next generation of coders like us more.

I will incorporate the "tags" in the tech input utility when the specs are more defined.

Richard: "they are used for the interface" - I presume that interface means user interface, rather than Java interface. How are they used?

My next query about tags is a little hard to define. They seem to have two sides: in some cases it appears tags have technologies, on the others hand it seems that technologies have tags. An example to make the point:

is it (assuming "tag" is replaced by another word in the final version):
(code)
<tag>
<name>Breeding</name>
<technology>
<name>biology</name>
<level>24</level>
</technology>
<technology>
<name>agriculture</name>
<level>8</level>
</technology>
</tag>
(/code)

or
(code)
<technology>
<name>Breeding</name>
<tag>
<name>biology</name>
<level>24</level>
</tag>
</technology>
<technology>
<name>Agriculture</name>
<tag>
<name>biology</name>
<level>8</level>
</tag>
</technology>
(/code)

Laurent: yes, I saw the TechRequirement.java file (nice Javadocs comments! do you think we can prevail on everyone to do that?). I have a TechnologySet class which gives, in effect, a list the technologies, and the level of each for some particular situation. Because it seems quite unclear whether technologies will be civilization-wide, or more specific - per province, per ethnic group, whatever, I heave left it general. A particular entity which is interested can register as an observer, or query directly to get the relevant information. Since the technology is also an observer, it can listen for RP allocations.

Mark: I think I will not be using your technology code. This happened by accident as I was writing the input utility. By the time I had the basis of that, the approaches had diverged too much. For example, I have a Required class, as well as a Helper class, and both are inner classes of Technology. There is also TechnologySet (described above).

Incidentally, the calculations will be in the TechnologySet, since they know what the levels are in a particular context.

I made one decision, consistent with XML practice: all the tags (the XML tags that is) are now lower case.

Since I am still gathering information about the model, the utility will be delayed until next week. "The cheque is in the mail".

Cheers

Gary

	22-03-2001 01:20									#67
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Dammit, got "[ code]" wrong again, here it is again

is it (assuming "tag" is replaced by another word in the final version):

code:


Breeding

biology
24


agriculture
8

code:


Breeding

biology
24



Agriculture

biology
8

	22-03-2001 01:22									#68
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I give up!

Cheers

Gary

	22-03-2001 02:25									#69
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I have some more questions, but since I am posting yet again, I thought I would try and get my code right:

is it (assuming "tag" is replaced by another word in the final version):

code:

<tag>
  <name>Breeding</name>
  <technology>
    <name>biology</name>
    <level>24</level>
  </technology>
  <technology>
    <name>agriculture</name>
    <level>8</level>
  </technology>
</tag>

code:

<technology>
  <name>Breeding</name>
  <tag>
    <name>biology</name>
    <level>24</level>
  </tag>
</technology>
<technology>
  <name>Agriculture</name>
  <tag>
    <name>biology</name>
    <level>8</level>
  </tag>
</technology>

	22-03-2001 03:23									#70
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No, applications and technologies are very different things. Applications do not have helpers and they do not process RP's in any way. They do not have tech levels or knowledge associated with them. Their level depends entirely on the level of the technologies they are associated with. They only rise and fall when the associated technologies rise and fall. This is not at all like the effects of helper techs.

In comparison to Civ 2, techs are (obviously) a more advanced version of the technology advances. Applications, on the other hand, are more advanced versions of the military units, buildings, and wonders. The relationship between techs and applications on Clash is about the same as it is in Civ 2.

Let me try to answer the tech tag question:

First, it appears that I haven't explained exactly what they are. From the xml it looked like you thought they were like a different tier of technologies. This is the current list of tech tags:

Agriculture
Disaster Prevention and Ecology
Education
Cash Flow and Economics
Exploration/Movement (includes mobile communication)
Government and Politics
Happiness and Social Control
Health
Infrastructure (includes fixed communication systems)
Military
Production
Prospecting and Extraction
Pure Science
Religion and Philosophy
Standard of Living

Think of "tech tags" as being things that the civilization does or strives for. Hmm...

I now rechristen "tech tags" as "Civilization Activities".

Maybe that will help.

As described in the OO model plan above, Civilization Activitiesdo exist independently and they have their own functionality. The Civilization Activities objects gather economic and social data, turn that data into RP's, and then process the RP's and give them to the individual technologies.

But technologies are not a part of Civilization Activities because each technology can be associated with many tech tags. A tech, for example "Water Delivery Systems," might be associated with the Civilization Activities of Health, Happiness, Infrastructure, and Standard of Living. This means that RP's devoted to all four of these goals will find their way to the advancement of this Tier 3 technology. It also means that advancement in this technology will have a positive effect on all four of those goals.

So the Civilization Activities have the following functionality:

• They determine RP production and feed those RP's to the technologies.
  
• They provide an easy way for the player and AI to deal with tech. They can simply say "Put effort into improving Infrastructire." This is what I mean by the interface. It is an intuitive way for the player to interact with the tech system. Of course, they can drill deeper if they wish, but this is an option so they don't have to get too involved if they don't want to.
  
• They help interpret the effects of technology and can alter other models based on technology growth. For example, the Health Civilization Activity would feed data on the overall health of the civ to the Disease model.
  

	22-03-2001 05:34									#71
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Gary:

We can try to enforce JavaDoc comments as a spec for all coders. I used to be quite good about it, but got out of the habit. Could you post exactly what level of commenting you think is most beneficial in the Clash Coding Standards Discussion thread? After a few go-arounds I'm sure we can agree on something that everyone can live with.

Not be using my code...
Well, I am pretty disappointed having absolutely wasted 20 hours of work, but I guess I'll get over it. Before you completely ignore it, you might consider raiding it for things like the tag names already written out etc.. In the end, you have to do whatever you think will allow you to progress most rapidly. But before you go on with all those inner classes, I suggest you consider that the design and our understanding of the tech system is still evolving, and you may have to undo a lot of those changes shortly...

Thanks for the detailed updates of what you are doing, hopefully it will prevent some train wrecks due to misunderstandings .

As you guessed, floats are the Clash standard. Most things in Clash will change gradually, rather than in steps as integers. However, since it's a game we didn't consider that the precision of double was necessary just about anywhere. Since the precision was unneeded, and a double takes up twice as much memory as a float, and we have Lots of them, that's the way we decided to go. Do you have an important issue to bring up on that?

Richard:

Good explanation of tags and their function! If you do a rewrite of the web page, I think you should include this section. I suspect we will also, with additional uses for tags as we get further into playtesting.

All:

On the issue of what object actually "has" tech in terms of game mechanics, I came up with what I think is an interesting thought recently. The idea is that each Complete ethnic group has its own TechnologySet. By complete ethnic group, I mean not the ethnic group component in a single square, but the whole ethnic group no matter how widely it spreads. There are also some complications with the idea, but I just wanted presented briefly and see if it makes sense to people as something we might pursue, or if it seems like the potential problems are larger than the likely benefits.

First of all, I want to state that the geographical extent of a complete ethnic group would be limited by communication technologies and other factors. So, for instance, when the British make colonies that are oceans away from the mother country, the colonists would form a distinct ethnic group. These "American" British would start exactly the same as the EG from which they came, but would evolve distinctly over time. (Some might say too distinctly ) This sort of cultural splitting has been in my mind as a good thing for Clash from the beginning....

So, now we have a separate British and American British EGs each of which have a unique TechnologySet. Tech diffusion would still occur between the Americans and the British (and other EGs as well), but they would not automatically get a scientific advance that the British EG has. With this approach, you can do most of the things that F. Smith was looking for like natives not having gunpowder technology while settlers in the same square did, or even there being different "City" and "rural" EGs living in the same country having different technologies.

Now for some problems... to support this kind of thing, we would need to keep track of RPs generated by each EG separately. I know the economy model doesn't support that right now, and it may be more hassle than it's worth. And there may be other problems with the idea I haven't foreseen yet.

But what do people think of the idea in general?

	22-03-2001 07:32									#72
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I thought we had planned on the model being flexible enough for tech to be contained in many combinations:

quote: There are four options for the detail at which we model technology: Once per civ Once per province Once per EG Once per EG per province

	22-03-2001 08:22									#73
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Yep, sorry, didn't mean to raise an alarm... I hadn't remembered this one being brought up. We'll be able to try them all, as you say.

	22-03-2001 09:05									#74
	Inflate your Upload Space

Actually Mark, I used quite a bit of your code, using the well known programming method called "cut and paste" (I refer you to the well-known book "Antipatterns" for a description of the joys of that method of programming). What I changed was the class structure.

Bear in mind that my primary aim has been to do the utility, not the model, in the shortest possible time. Consequently my learning curve has been pretty steep, and my refactoring rate huge. However, it has given me a wonderful opportunity to ask lots of questions.

I have no problems with using floats for the present purpose.

As I pointed out, my TechnologySet class doesn't care what it is attached to, or what uses it. In passing, my Technology class which contains everthing immutable about Technologies - that is, whatever is read in from the XML configuration file - is neither an observer nor observable - nothing in it changes! Quite a bit of it was cribbed from Mark's code.

I am about to go home for the weekend, and will go over Richard's notes on Civilization Activities in detail when I get there. With my well-known penchant for changing everything in sight, I might use just "Activities" in the code.

Cheers

Gary

	22-03-2001 16:56									#75
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Thanks Gary for the description of what you did with my code, that was about what I'd expected you'd do . Makes me feel better . From the previous description is sounded like you'd started utterly from scratch... which didn't make much sense to me, since much of what I'd done was pretty generic.

	23-03-2001 01:42									#76
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I have just finished reading a book by Gerry Weinberg and Don Gause (psychologists of programming) called "Are Your Lights On?"

I fear that my lights are off. I have come home a day early (taking Friday off) so I would have three clear days to get the input utility done.

And I left all the source code I had written behind.

Of course what programming project doesn't have slippage...

So I guess I will spend the next three days on other aspects of the system. For example, my XML code uses the the Apache xerces implementation. This is a jar file 1.49Mb long. It won't fit onto a floppy disk. On the other hand, we only use a small part of it, and the source code is available. So I will extract the required part of the source code and incorporate it in the Clash input utility.

Which leads immediately to my next topic. Game save status, individual user configurations, and other aspects of the game could all be stored in XML format. I have tried to write the input and storage classes in a general way. Also, Java streams allow, in a very simple way, any files to be zipped. This makes them smaller (obviously) and also makes them somewhat less easily hacked. Alternatively I can quite easily write a triple DES encryption system to make them completely unhackable. This I see as a possible later addition.

The question of Applications. Here is Richard's comment:

quote: No, applications and technologies are very different things. Applications do not have helpers and they do not process RP's in any way. They do not have tech levels or knowledge associated with them. Their level depends entirely on the level of the technologies they are associated with. They only rise and fall when the associated technologies rise and fall. This is not at all like the effects of helper techs.

and an earlier quote:

quote: For individual Technologies: m = GrowthRateMultiplier c = UpkeepMultiplier default DR = RPDiminishingReturnsMultiplier Ts = StartLevel O = HelperLevelOffset h = HelperTechEffect I = ExternalGrowthRateMultiplier E = ExternalUpkeepMultiplier L = ApplicationLongevity

The last entry appears to apply to Applications. However, I am not sure.

Do applications have Requirements? If so, do the requirements have start values?

How do the actual objects (units, buildings, whatever) interact with the corresponding application? Can the application be viewed as "permission to build"?

As an aside, while I and E are in view, I do not think that one should program for futures. That is, if something isn't actually in the model, it should be left out, and added later if necessary. There is an extensive literature (starting with Kent Beck et al in the XP web site) all of which says the programming for something that might be used is counter-productive. I refer you to website at www.xprogramming.org. However, here is a quote from that website:

quote: You’re NOT gonna need it! Often you will be building some class and you’ll hear yourself saying "We’re going to need...". Resist that impulse, every time. Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them. Here’s why: Your thoughts have gone off track. You’re thinking about what the class might be, rather than what it must be. You were on a mission when you started building that class. Keep on that mission rather than let yourself be distracted for even a moment. Your time is precious. Hone your sense of progress to focus on the real task, not just on banging out code. You might not need it after all. If that happens, the time you spend implementing the method will be wasted; the time everyone else spends reading it will be wasted; the space it takes up will be wasted. You find that you need a getter for some instance variable. Fine, write it. Don’t write the setter because "we’re going to need it". Don’t write getters for other instance variables because "we’re going to need them". The best way to implement code quickly is to implement less of it. The best way to have fewer bugs is to implement less code. You’re not gonna need it!

Now, Civization Activities. This is starting to look more like an interface than an object, though, like all interfaces, they will have objects which implement the interface. One possibility is to use the Observer/Observed interface. If this is used, we then have a TecnologyActivity object which implements the CivilizationActivity interface.

Must go now - the phone is needed.

Cheers

	23-03-2001 03:17									#77
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Sorry about that. That list you quoted was never meant to be a list of what should be put in the GUI. It was simply a listing of all the variables used. I only meant to make the distinction between variables that were needed once per system and ones that we needed a lot of.

E and I will be important, but I just realized that I misplaced them. They would work a lot better if they were a part of the Civilization Activity class. They are both based on the society, and it was decided earlier that the different Civilization Activities would have different growth rates, based on the values of the society. So they would be used in a different set of equations.

I have another idea that could help the system. I know that programmers absolutely hate this, and I'm sorry. But this is a small change and shouldn't take too much time.

Currently, the helper tech effect is based on the difference between the helper tech level and the starting helper tech level. This means that if Physics level 70 is a requirement and Physics started at level 10 and it is now level 80, the new tech would instantly get 70 tech levels worth of help. That has been shown to have the potential to make problems.

But what if the helper effect was beased on the difference between the requirement and the current level of the tech? That would mean that the new tech gets no help at the start, and in the above example it would only bel helped by the ten levels of Physics above the requirement. I think this would work better, and it is a lot closer to Mark's initial proposal for helper techs.

Helper techs can now have a negative inpact, as is logical. A few quick spreadsheet tests have confirmed that a reasonable amount of tech loss occurs when the helper drops below the required level.

I realize that the application system has not been clearly defined in one place. Let me attempt to fix that. But first, I'll organize the variable names better.

-----

This chart is an attempt at a complete list of the variables used by the system. Mark and LGJ, please review and check it for accuracy and throrughness.

Black variables will be input in the GUI, and red ones are numbers from other sources that will be used in calculations.

General Values (Once per System):

default m = BaseGrowthRate
default c = BaseUpkeep
default W = BaseGlobalHelperEffect
default DR = BaseRPDiminishingReturns
MV = MultiplierVariable (typically 2)
GV = GrowthVariable (typically 10)

Technology Values (Once Per Tech):

m = GrowthRateMultiplier
c = UpkeepMultiplier
DR = RPDiminishingReturnsMultiplier
Ts = StartLevel

(Set Helper Technologies)


Tn = InitialTechLevel
Tn+1 = FinalTechLevel
H = TotalHelperEffect


And the helper equation is now:

RHL = h1*(HT1-Ts1+O1) + . . . + hx*(HTn-Tsn+Ox) (Variables defined below)

TotalHelperEffect = MultiplierVariable^(RHL/BaseGlobalHelperEffect)

For Helper Techs (Once for each of a technology's helper techs):

h = HelperTechEffect
O = HelperLevelOffset
Ts = TechRequirement

HT = CurrentValue


For Applications (Once Per Application):

L = ApplicationLongTermGrowth
G = ApplicationShortTermGrowth
F = ApplicationLossModifier

E = ApplicationEffectiveness


(Required Technologies)

For Required Techs (Once for each of an application's required techs)"

R = TechRequirement
h = TechEffect

T = CurrentValue


E will be calculated for each application as follows:

(For readability, I'll use the shortened names. Otherwise the equations would be much wider than a page.)

RTL = h1*(T1 - R1) + . . . + hx*(Tx - Rx)

E = RTL*G + (1+.1*(MV-1)*L) ^ (RTL/GV) when RTL is positive or zero.
E = (GV+RTL)*F when RTL is negative.

Whew. I hope all that was complete and accurate.

	23-03-2001 06:02									#78
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Gary:

I think that XML input and output are only really useful in the long-term for the specification files associated with things like technologies, economic goods, infrastructure, military units, and AI tendencies. Putting the whole save file for the game out as XML seems to me unnecessary, since the save file would then be prohibitively large. The game data itself will probably be several MB, and once you wrap that all in XML, well, the mind boggles...

I like your XP quote. When you get a chance you should put it on the coding discussion page.

Richard:

I think you did a great job with this synopsis! The only thing I didn't like about the variables stuff was:

Ts = TechRequirement
That is confusing since Ts has another meaning...
Can we use:
Tr = TechRequirement? Just so there is no confusion between starting tech levels and tech requirement levels?

I think your new helper tech formula is better than before... As I bet you thought I would but as I explained to you in an e-mail a few weeks ago, I still think your approach on the helper tech's still fundamentally is Not going to work, and fear you're going to have to go back and make tremendous changes at a later date. Since Gary and the others haven't seen my analysis of what is wrong with the system, I'm going to go ahead and post it here. One note here, I wrote this before Richard proposed the new helper tech formula. The quoted e-mail uses the old formula, but I believe the fundamental issues I'm bringing up are still relevant with the new formula, just slightly subdued. For that reason (and innate laziness ) I haven't edited the previous text to update the formula.

Previous e-mail starts here...

As an outgrowth of the work I'm doing on the technology model, I think I've identified a very serious problem with your helper tech expression. The problem occurred in the change that you made so that you can handle computers and such in the way you prefer. I believe the new expression (which I've copied below) doesn't give the right scaling behavior for helper techs as tech levels change from numbers like 10 to numbers like 100.

THL = h1(T1-Ts1+O1) + . . . hn(Tn-Tsn+On)
where T1 through Tn are helper technologies
H = MV^(THL/2W)

I think I can make my point most clearly by considering a technology that has no helpers, call it A, and a technology B that has a single helper. Because A has no helpers, that is equivalent to H = 1 whether you are at the low-tech end (10), or the high-tech (100). Now let's assume that A and B are supposed to *on average* grow at the same rate. (Obviously because B has a helper tech, depending on the helper tech you would expect it to either grow somewhat faster, or somewhat slower than A.) For simplicity I will assume that all starting tech levels and offsets are 0, that MV is 2, that h = 5 and that W is set so that A and B grow similarly at an overall tech level of 10. So we want H for B = 1. If we assume that when B and A are 10, B's helper is also at a level of 10, then W would have to be very large to have H be approximately 1. That's is not a very satisfactory solution, so I'll relax one of my assumptions, and say that we will change the offset to -10. I will follow your rule and have W=3h for 'safety'. But now at the very start of the game, when all techs might be around the level of 1, H = 2^(-9/3) = 1/8. So two techs that by construction are supposed to grow equally Can't over any reasonble range of techs with your model. When we get to tech = 100 then H = 2^(90/3) which is Vastly different from 1 that we have for tech A.

In short, the Only way to make A and B behave similarly on average is to make W preposterously large, basically eliminating the helper function entirely. I really think this system is broken, and we're going to find other bizarre things like this. Before you spend lots of time putting in values I encourage you to test your spreadsheet over the broad ranges of tech values that will occur in the game.

And the same problem occurs when you contrast techs with "low strength" helpers, meaning something like a single or two helpers that have low helper coefficients, with "high-strength" helpers. I'm not going to go through the whole presentation again, but it appears to me that unless we are willing to stick with the specification that Absolutely Every Technology Must have a set of helper technologies with roughly equal "strength" this system is fundamentally flawed.

Old e-mail ends here...

I'm not trying to be provocative or abusive, just trying to save what appears to me to be enormous amounts of potentially wasted effort.

IMO we should go back to the old formula:
THL = h1(T1-T+O1) + . . . hn(Tn-T+On), where T is the level of the tech that is being helped. For those who weren't here for the long, drawn out, previous discussion, what this the equation requires that all technologies increase levels at a roughly similar rate throughout the game. It doesn't mean there can't be fairly large imbalances, but a large imbalance would be a spread of 20 points or so between best and worst technology level. I completely realize this precludes your (Richard) doing technologies like computers as you wish. (Quick synopsis; computers could start at a level of say 10, even though most other techs are 60 at that stage of the game). I think we can easily handle your previous objections about how computers would work by simply making Computers an application with an effectiveness parameter that grows very rapidly as some Skill like "Computational Machines" grows above the 60, or whatever, level.

I realize I haven't laid out my arguments in an airtight manner, or one that can be necessarily understood by everyone. But hopefully I've outlined enough of what I think the problems are, and the solutions might be, that we can figure out whether my ideas are all wet (in which case I'll apologize ) or are mostly correct.

-Mark

	23-03-2001 10:06									#79
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Not to be picky, but just to be clear for anyone who wants to use this for making differnt scenerios, the Civilization Activities 'Health' should be renamed 'Health and Biology'...also we need to add 'Chemistry' and 'Eletronics' or whatever you want to call them....i looked over that list Rich and i couldn't find a place to put 1> Gunpowder (unless you want pure science because gunpowder was not oginally used for 'Military') and also modern electronic devices such as computers and other stuff except infrastucture which doesn't make sence. I think with that we can now cover all Real World stuff.

	23-03-2001 10:23									#81
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I'd have to disagree, LGJ. Chemistry and Electronics are not major civ activities. They are tools that let the civ do other things. Electronics would fall under categories like "Communications & Media" and "Research" Similarly, The Biology technology is associated with the "Health Care" and "Food" Civilization Activities. Chemistry, like many Tier 1 techs, is used for many things, so it will get RP's from many Civilization Activities and it will aid many Civilization Activities.

Actually, there is a more current list that is based on the infraclasses. I had forgotten about that earlier.

quote: Idea: All infraclasses should be tech tags. Since the technology is designed to reflect what people do, I can fix the tech model so that there is a tech tag for every infraclass this model has. This way, the tech model can generate exactly what the econ model wants. Each infraclass will then have an ideal tech level T and an actual tech level A. The connection helps the tech model as well. Investment in a certain infraclass would generate tagged RP's for that tech tag. These RP's are then distributed among the techs. This should be a relatively painless way to connect RP production to economic activity. So the current list of tech tags would be: Infraclasses: Food (All Agricultural research)* Consumed goods (Standard of Living?) Welfare (Standard of Living?) Education Research (Pure Science) Religion (and Philosophy) Housing Durable Goods (?) Health Care Water & Sewage Power & Heating Communications & Media Transportation Recreation & Luxuries Administration (Government and Politics) Financial Infrastructure (Cash Flow and Economics?) Nature Preservation (Disaster Prevention and Ecological Studies?) Military Infrastructure Military Units Kapital Investment (Production Technologies) *The names in parentheses are the previous names for the tech tags. In some cases I had to extend the infraclass definition a little to get them to match. A question mark means I'm not sure what the infraclass means or I'm not sure if the match is good, so please give feedback on this. Others: Exploration/Movement Diplomacy and Propaganda Prospecting and Extraction

	23-03-2001 17:30									#82
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Hey Richard:

Well I don't want to spend 20 hours going over this, so just a few points:

You said way back when that your system would be easier to modify than a traditional civ2 system. It seems to me that with our scads of parameters that have to be finely tuned it is nothing of the sort. FE your stated proposal to tweak Z values until the system works means that adding even a single new tech can then require a lot of work to rebalance everything. When I add a tech that helps something else, I have to rebalance Z values for all the helpers with that same tag, or the balancing won't be correct (it appears to me). Adding three new techs could become a weekend project. This is just speculation at this point, but please keep it in mind.

Also the Z values IMO should reflect Real Importance of the tag to the tech in question, not essentially arbitrary tweaking to keep the centrifugal tendencies of the system in check so it doesn't explode.

But in truth, its your potentially wasted effort if the system as described doesn't work out, so I'll back off again so I can return to coding. Since my annoying people full-time on design issues is what lead the project to stall for quite a bit in the demo area .

BTW Cannon should be an Application, at least in my view, so they can grow in effectiveness arbitrarily faster than Agriculture just like Computers...

	23-03-2001 19:26									#83
	Remove this text

We only have to tweak the values if we insist that the techs rise at a similar speed. Even so, these kinds of tweaks are nothing compared to what would be required if we insisted that all techs should be the same at all times. Also remember that the RP input is only one way to tweak the tech. There are many other ways to adjust how quickly it will rise. For exampl, we could assign diminishing returns to techs that have lots of helpers. Remember that in our tests, we almost always keep many things the same, thus hiding our ability to adjust the system.

I have tried to make a civ 2 scenario with a custom tech tree. That was harder than anything I have done with this system.

Tweaking the techs on the spreadsheet is a very easy and painless process. Maybe it would get more diffficult if all the techs were in different windows. So after the tech builder is done, we might want to write a "tech adjuster" that resembles the spreadsheet. It would take data from the tech builder and display the techs in a list format, where all the values could be fixed on one screen.

	24-03-2001 02:08									#84
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I will isolate all the technology formulae in such a way that they can be altered easily without affecting the overall program. In an extreme case the calculation classes could be read in as data, so you could have a menu of possible algebraic models to choose from.

On the other hand, the more parameters, the bigger job in tuning, as Mark has pointed out.

Cheers

	25-03-2001 00:24									#85
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With no instructions or help other than my problem solving skills and excess of free time, I have managed to upload the tech spreadsheets to my school VAX account and provide a working link to them in my website.

	28-03-2001 04:16									#88
	Full PM-box? Change here!

A quote from Richard:

quote: One possible source of confusion is that "Z values" were also sometimes called "tech tags." The Z value is the number that shows how much the tech is connected to a certain Civilization Activity. A Z value of 10 means that the tech is very important to that activity, so it will recieve a large share of RP's, and will have a big impact on other models that use the data from the Civilization Activity. Z values of 1 or 2 represent a small effect. If the tech does not relate to the Civilization Activity at all, the Z value is zero. The Z value is what is defined in the GUI Tech Builder. The default would be zero, in which case the Civilization Activity is not listed in the editor. The tech tree creator would select from the available list of Civilization Activities and assign a Z value to it. Each tech would typically have 1 to 4 nonzero Z values, meaning that it affects one to four Civilization Activities. A programmer's name for the "Z value" might be "ActivityAffectFactor."

Probably intended to be ActivityEffectFactor, where the "Factor" part doesn't add information. I would use ActivityEffect.

On the other hand, also quoting Richard:

quote: Technology Values (Once Per Tech): m = GrowthRateMultiplier c = UpkeepMultiplier DR = RPDiminishingReturnsMultiplier Ts = StartLevel (Set Helper Technologies) Tn = InitialTechLevel Tn+1 = FinalTechLevel H = TotalHelperEffect And the helper equation is now: RHL = h1*(HT1-Ts1+O1) + . . . + hx*(HTn-Tsn+Ox) (Variables defined below) TotalHelperEffect = MultiplierVariable^(RHL/BaseGlobalHelperEffect

There is no mention of Z values or activity effect factor here. Presumably it should be part of the technology data at read-in.

Is it intended that the Activities be hard-coded or read in? I recommend (as always) the latter.

Activities are, it seems, a list of types. There will need to be objects which actually do something. So one of the other models will create an instance of an activity, assigning RPs for example. Some mechanism will have to be put in place for the technology objects to be aware of these activities. I will think about it.

One of the most important requirements of OO programming is that every object must be created and have an owner, with destruction rights. This needs to be quite specific in the program design. I am not sure how Activities fit within this framework.

Turning now to Applications, shouldn't an Application have a name? Also, how does a particular Application get associated with, say, a unit or a building?

Am I right in assuming that Technologies have Helper techs, but no Required techs, but Applications are the other way round?

What is RTL? It does not seem to be on the extended name list.

It does seem that the only difference (apart from the context in which they are used) between helper and required techs is the existence of an offset in one of them. My inclination is to use a single class for both. Mark would be happy about that - helper techs would once again be stand-alone classes rather than inner classes.

Cheers

	28-03-2001 06:22									#90
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Originally posted by Gary

quote: There is no mention of Z values or activity effect factor here. Presumably it should be part of the technology data at read-in.

and the reply:

quote: D'oh! I had a feeling I was missing something. Yes, they should be there.

Each technology would then have a list of relevant activities, with the ActivityEffect.

It worries me that this system does not shut off technologies. When a civilization is researching interstellar space travel it will still be allocating research point to the development of the bow and arrow.

quote: A preliminary idea for distribution or RP’s would be to give each tech a percentage of the total RP spent as follows: For every tech [associated with that Activity], raise 2 to the power of Z/2 and then subtract one. Call this the Y value. Add up all of these values to find the X value. Each tech gets a percentage of the total RP’s spent equal to Y / X.

This system has problems if the Observer/Observable model is used. When the Observer (the entry in the TechnologySet table) gets a signal, it has no way of knowing how many other technologies are also getting the signal, so it cannot add up the values in this manner. The only way that I can think of to get around this problem is to have an Activity object holding a list of technologies, and the proportion to go to each. Then, when it signals to the Technology object, it can work out the correct percentages.

quote: For now, the Economy model could be the other model that creates Activities and "owns" them. We will add other Activities later, but for Demo 5 the list of infraclasses above will do fine.

I will check the economy model for this aspect.

quote: An application is a unit or building. More specifically, it is the ability to build that thing and it tells how effective that thing will be. It is (correct me if I'm wrong, Mark) a class, and everything the civ produces with that name is an instance of that class. In addition to describing what the things do (their primary purpose), the Application classes will have the functionality that connects their actions to the tech model. Legion and Cathedral are examples of Applications. They become available when the civ reaches a certain level of technology. The Legion's battle power will vary as the levels of the associated techs vary. The cathedral's ability to make people happy will vary as the associated techs vary.

The connection between the actual unit or building, and the tech hierarchy can be achieved in one of two ways:

1. Inheritance. Every "thing" which is an Application inherits from a base Activity class.
2. Containment. Every "thing" which is an Application contains an Activity object, as described above, with the required properties.

The second option is much the better one, since it is more reasonable to have a military unit inherit from another military unit. In addition, this option allows an Application to be influenced by more than one Activity, which can only add power to the game.

It will mean that other coders using the Application system will have to point their instances of objects at the correct Activity.

quote: RTL is not a programming or game model concept at all. It, like RHL, is simply a way to make the equation look less messy and ugly. Those two things do not exist outside of those equations, and they are only in the equations for readability.

I now see that they are working variables. I think I might call them "Esmeralda" and "Clementine" in the code.

Cheers