05-01-2002 06:17									#1
	Planning for Demos 7 & 8 Full PM-box? Change here!

Hi All, and Happy New Year!

BTW save Everything big you post in the near future... I would have lost two long posts in the latest server mess if I hadn't had them backed up.

Here is a coding plan for the not-too-distant future that I have worked up with some input from Gary. It is intended to roughly cover progress through April 2002. It is in priority order. I am going to try to go to some level of detail in this, although the details will be greatest for the items nearest in time. Currently my guess is that the breakpoint for demo 7 comes, appropriately enough, after item 7. However, due to the vagaries of fate and team availability, items before seven might be left out, and items after seven might well be included. Some code architecture items will not be clear, just ignore a milestone if it’s meaning is mystifying.


There are still many open issues from the Planning for D6 thread. Everyone who is interested is encouraged to glance over it again and see if the features mentioned there that didn’t make it on to my list belong. After some discussion I will revise this list as appropriate.

Let me know what you think!

1. Refactored territory administration system, with economics implications. (Gary, Mark, already about 80% complete)

2. Implement civs controlling territory organized in provinces with many squares (Gary) (requires 1)

3. Technology model running with limited test techs.
3a. Agree to XML spec and method for handling Applications (Richard, Gary, Laurent)
3b. Tech test code passes simple test case for tech and application activity, and turn handler appropriately distributing research points as called for by tech test XML. (Gary)
3c. Military code uses tech system to determine when elements are available for build, determine effectiveness of elements, and feedback RPs into tech when battles occur. (Laurent)
3d. Economics code uses tech system to alter productivity and economic sectors (farming etc.) and feedback RPs into tech from these activities. Education infrastructure creates RP's player can assign. (Mark)
3e. Alpha tech interface that informs players about levels of technologies, and allows allocation of RPs generated by education to various Activities. (Gary)

4. Old government/social model code integrated mostly as-is. Essentially we have F_Smith's old implementation of the government/social system from "the beast". It already has a simple interface for changing government model parameters. The plan here is to take that old code, adapted to the current architecture, and get it into the next major demo. (Mark, already about 40% complete)

5. Rivers, ports, ships, boarding etc. (Gary, Laurent)

6. A much improved AI, using AI Plan architecture to handle relatively simple attack in defense issues. (Gary, Mark)

7. All game initialization data in XML files (mainly settings, tech, economy, military data and scenarios - we will leave game saving and restoring for D8+). (Gary, Laurent, Mark)

--- Release Demo 7 (Tentative)

8. The start of an on-line help system. The on-line system should have links to the relevant manual portions. (Gary)

9. A more useful merchant system, eliminate merchant teleporting, enable use of merchants as military quartermasters, have areas of the map which are attractive to both civilizations and merchants because of their resources. Perhaps use merchants for tech diffusion. (Mark)

10. Much larger tech tree with more Applications and Activities. (Richard)

11. Limited diplomacy model (Mark or Gary, or hopefully some new coder).

12. Update government/social model to current spec including Riots model (Mark)
12b. Update government GUI to current spec (Gary).

13. A beginning proper map generator (Gary).

14. Social/economy model interactions.

15. save files

--- Release Demo 8 (Tentative)

[edit]Our targets have changed substantially since this went up. In mid-February we redirected ourselves in theReworking our Demo Approach thread. The goals in this thread are still relevant, but making the game more understandable to playtesters who walk in now gets higher priority than just implementing more models. What is listed here as demos 7 and 8 might stretch to Demo 10 or so under the new situation.

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 29-03-2002 at 07:42

	08-01-2002 00:38									#2
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My main comment is that I would promote 7 to position 1. My reason is that this area is progressing, and the more work that is done before the reorganization, the more work that will need refactoring. Once it is done, adding new features in any of the areas becomes quite easy.

Cheers

	08-01-2002 02:29									#3
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Agree with Gary. Also promote #15 somewhere before demo 7.

IMHO Saves=everything

	08-01-2002 05:58									#4
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Hi All:

Gary, I did agree that 7 could go first with you, just forgot to bump it up. And the list was meant to be mostly mine anyway

Axi, there is already a guy named Chris Maeda working on the saves. I don't think he's shown up on the forum yet... So there is hope for your demands!

	09-01-2002 08:06									#5
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I feel quite strongly the saves should be incremental. That is, you don't save the game, just the changes since the last save. This will make the size of the saved files enormously smaller.

I also believe that it will be possible to save the entire progress of the game this way, allowing restarting at any point, or animated replays, to see just what did happen.

Cheers

	09-01-2002 13:20									#6
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quote: I feel quite strongly the saves should be incremental. That is, you don't save the game, just the changes since the last save. This will make the size of the saved files enormously smaller.

Although I tend to agree since it makes save/load faster, I doubt on the file size issue. Do you mean you will have several linked files (in which case the latter files will indeed be small)? If you have a single file, it will usually get bigger after 2 incremental saves than it would have been had it been rewritten entirely.

	10-01-2002 01:15									#7
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What I had in mind was a single zip file (per game) containing a zipped up file for the start, and one for each successive turn.

What I do want to avoid is having to save a possibly huge, and substantially identical, map for every save. If a map is Earth sized, it will have something like 120x300 squares (depending on the projection accepted - remember my comments on using real coordinates). Each map square has around 1000 bytes of information, say. This gives 36 Mb per map. 1000 turns gives...

Cheers

	10-01-2002 01:18									#8
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I really like the Civ option, at the end of the game, of replaying the spread of empires. I usually replay it many times. The incremental method allows very detailed replays.

One thing missing from Civ is that when you meet a new civilization you have no idea of its history. This is unrealistic since that is pretty much the first thing you would find out. I would envisage that (at a price) you could replay another civilization's history, to get some idead of its behaviour.

Cheers

	10-01-2002 02:05									#9
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Gary, if we used incremental saves, then swapping savegames would be impossible. We should do it like every other game out there. Plus making it possible to isolate the elements of the savegame from the file (the map, the population, the infrastructure, the civs).

As for the map, it will be as big as our computers will let it be. We may end up with a game unplayabe in maps with more than 1000 tiles - so what?

	10-01-2002 05:18									#10
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I also think we should have standard save files. But I do really like the replay option. I think it would be worthwhile to have a dedicated file, or sequence of files to enable replay as Gary suggests. Since for replay many of the very small details aren't important, those files could be relatively small compared to a save file.

	12-01-2002 05:00									#11
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quote: Gary, if we used incremental saves, then swapping savegames would be impossible.

I cannot see why this follows at all. What is the problem?

quote: I also think we should have standard save files. But I do really like the replay option. I think it would be worthwhile to have a dedicated file, or sequence of files to enable replay as Gary suggests. Since for replay many of the very small details aren't important, those files could be relatively small compared to a save file.

I think that the extra complexity of having two systems will probably be counter-productive. The only possible reason is to save disk space, and I really don't see this as being a problem.
There is another possiblity which I like the idea of - that is to load the game at some point, and choose another civilization. So yuou can play the game as Scipio or as Hannibal, to see how well you do. Incremental saves allow this in an easy manner.

Cheers

	13-01-2002 05:22									#12
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I think Axi's point was that if there are 452 sequential files involved in a save, and you miss on, you're dead. whereas if there is one file its easy not to screw up.

quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas There is another possiblity which I like the idea of - that is to load the game at some point, and choose another civilization. So yuou can play the game as Scipio or as Hannibal, to see how well you do. Incremental saves allow this in an easy manner.

Periodic saves of the whole game also allow this.

I just think that So Much is going to change over even a few turns that you will end up saving virtually the entire game every time anyway. The unchanging parts are: The map outlines, and numbers of sites per map square will change infrequently. Just about everyting else will change over relatively small numbers of turns. Everything in the economy changes gradually, Same for much of the Social model. These are the largest memory-users in the game.

At any rate, we need something to save the Whole game for the first turn. I don't think incremental saves are going to be Needed, even if we go that way, for Many demos into the future. So I suggest we table the topic until we can see what fraction of the data change over a few turns, and we can then gauge the worthiness of incremental saves.

Cya,

Mark

	13-01-2002 05:47									#13
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quote: I think Axi's point was that if there are 452 sequential files involved in a save, and you miss on, you're dead. whereas if there is one file its easy not to screw up.

There will be only one zip file per game. It will contain the original scenario in an internal file. Each incremental save will be another internal file. So to send the game to someone else you send just the zip file.

Actually this system uses less files than other systems, one per game rather than one per save.

Cheers

	13-01-2002 06:02									#14
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Hey Gary:

Sorry, you had said that way at the beginning of the discussion and I missed it.

	13-01-2002 14:52									#15
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I want to echo Axi's question about swapping files. If you somehow delete the save file, will you be able to save it and have the same functionality? (save as).
You will miss the replay, since we won't keep all the history in-memory. Now, you don't have to delete files, but you can swap them, make save as, copy and move them, and eventually screw up the final replay.

	13-01-2002 17:25									#16
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quote: There will be only one zip file per game. It will contain the original scenario in an internal file. Each incremental save will be another internal file. So to send the game to someone else you send just the zip file. Actually this system uses less files than other systems, one per game rather than one per save.

If this file isn't HUGE, then it's OK, you're right. Such a savegame must be less than 1MB large, to be functional.

	14-01-2002 22:50									#17
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quote: I want to echo Axi's question about swapping files. If you somehow delete the save file, will you be able to save it and have the same functionality? (save as). You will miss the replay, since we won't keep all the history in-memory. Now, you don't have to delete files, but you can swap them, make save as, copy and move them, and eventually screw up the final replay.

Do I understand that you want to cover the bizarre situation where you delete the save file while you are playing the game and want to use the game to restore the save file? I would take the view that deleting the save file is deleting the save file and you get what one would expect - no saved game. It is legitimate for a game designer to have some of the data needed for the game, but not immediately needed, residing in a file. Deleting that file would destroy that particular game. The save file would come under that category. Delete it ONLY when you are completely finished with the game.

quote: If this file isn't HUGE, then it's OK, you're right. Such a savegame must be less than 1MB large, to be functional.

Remember there is one file per game. Civ 3 save files are around 2Mb PER SAVE, so I guess they are not functional.

Cheers

	15-01-2002 04:12									#18
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quote: Civ 3 save files are around 2Mb PER SAVE

I don't have civ3. If this is so, then they must have a ton of new stuff in, since the civ2 saves were no more than 187 kb each.

So much for swapping savegames... We Europeans are mostly still using 56k modems you know...

	20-01-2002 14:39									#19
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Gee, that makes my 33k modem look sick.

I was wrong about 2Mb for Civ3. It was too early in the game when I said that - 3Mb looks closer now.

I have to get out and clear out all the saved files every 50 moves or so, or the thing just freezes with a no room to save message.

Cheers

	09-02-2002 20:23									#20
	Update on D7 Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

Hi All:

The current plan is to have Demo 7 ready maybe in the first week of March. Of course it may slip from that due to life, the universe and everything. Most of items 1-7 in the thread at the post's top should be in there pending unforseen problems. D7 should be significantly more fun than D6, although we obviously still have a ways to go.

We are now working on getting a version that is suitable for releasing advanced versions to a limited number of people. Stian can use it for swapping in tiles on the fly in a much more efficient way than before, so we can determine the final D7 release tileset. Axi will be able to use it to do some initial testing in advance of the release. Chris can write the D7 manual using it. I am going to try and get that out to them by the end of the weekend to just get them set up.

-Mark

	10-02-2002 00:33									#21
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quote: We are now working on getting a version that is suitable for releasing advanced versions to a limited number of people.

Speak for yourself, some of us are working on a version that will compile. Then, in a dreamy distant time, will run!

Cheers

	29-03-2002 03:43									#22
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I thought an update on Demo 7 is about due.

The xml system is now working completely. This was the biggie. As a result the download is quite a bit smaller.

The government/social model is in the throes of being written, but doesn't actually do anything, though the ruler preferences screen now works.

The immediate "to do" items I have is to make the settler unit work, and to code population diffusion, with some sort of city generator, and to type in the xml data fo rthe scenario.

We will also need icons for resources to show on the map, and some sort of implementation of this.

At that point we will be able to release Demo 7. I don't think the fact that the social model is incomplete will affect D7. Certainly the lack of AI will not, there being only one civilization involved.

Have I missed anything out?

Cheers

	29-03-2002 04:06									#23
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Hey Gary:

Sounds good to me! As soon as there is enough working and novel stuff that is not too buggy it needs to go to the tutorial-writers, whoever they may be. It was supposed to be Chris W. but he has been rather scarce, so I don't know if we can count on him. I've emailed him to get his take on what his status is.

I will try to make some econ GUI modifications to make things easier to pick up for the players. Or if I'm lucky the GUI guys might be able to do something for it. We need a bit of discussion so we get something that will fit current and near-future needs. That said the econ GUI isn't a showstopper if I fail to deliver...

	29-03-2002 06:30									#24
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Maybe we could let the South American Team have a go at a first cut for the new economics gui for D7?

Cheers

	29-03-2002 06:43									#25
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Aaaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!

I moved my settler unit, and the program immediately announced that I was victorious, on the grounds that there were no other civilizations left!

We need different victory conditions!

Cheers

	29-03-2002 07:20									#26
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Hey Gary, at least you didn't spend an hour looking for a bug caused by accidentally making a variable static! That blew a good chunk of my evening.

The victory condition I suggested way back was to reach X total population. 300k was the number I picked... Have you got a VictoryCondition class? If not, sounds like its time for one that we can switch amongst a bunch of things TBD.

	29-03-2002 07:26									#27
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Yes, I had decided to to just that. I will get onto it.

Cheers

	29-03-2002 08:38									#28
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The new victory condition system is now working. We have, so far, only extermination and population conditions.

Now if the damned settler would only settle when I tell it to...

Cheers

	30-03-2002 03:07									#29
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I would like some indication of exactly what is expected from Demo 7. At present we have:

A new scenario with:

1. A settler unit, which can settle a square.

2. A population which must be achieved.

3. A map which can be explored.

4. The settler is part of a task force with a horde unit as well. On settling, the settler unit vanishes, leaving the horde.

What I know to be required:

1. A system of population diffusion.

The problem with this is that it is hardly a game. If you do nothing but click end turn, eventually the population will reach the level required.

Big deal.

What else do we need to make it, if not a game, at least a learning experience?

Perhaps some sort of resource location and development?

Cheers

	30-03-2002 03:31									#30
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas The problem with this is that it is hardly a game. If you do nothing but click end turn, eventually the population will reach the level required. Big deal. What else do we need to make it, if not a game, at least a learning experience? Perhaps some sort of resource location and development?

Hi Gary:

Yeah, we could have something like produce 20 units of gold per turn. But again if the population diffuses, the people will invest in gold production all by themselves, and you get a win by sitting there.

I have to admit that I had envisioned the early Dawn scenario you're talking about as mosly a tutorial that wouldn't get very gamelike until step 2 (As in the Reworking thread) where we introduce barbs and tech.

We could also throw in some barbs ahead of schedule. In effect do part of step 2. This would mean the player would need to build military and some roads.

I thought the plan was to have the intro demo thing to help players over the learning curve everyone whines about because they can't take 15 min. to look over the manual. (And I admit the econ interface especially ain't very self-explanatory.) But the Game in demo 7, after we restructured our approach in the Reworking thread, was still supposed to be something like the old Delenda scenario. At least that was what I thought. If we don't have something like that, we will give the appearance that we are going Backwards in features.

I can brainstorm ideas, but first I'd like to see where you're coming from in regard to my comments above.

BTW there was lots of discussion in Reworking our Demo Approach from people that thought the first scenario was too simple and un-gamelike. They had a variety of suggestions, some of which are more practical at this early stage than others. You should give it a read again, and see if anything appeals.