Ultra-low impact housing and public policy
Politicians are once again talking openly about how to reduce the cost of housing. I know how to do this, and have a genuinely modest proposal.
This house, as I've described earlier, is almost entirely bio-degradable. Without maintenance, it would fairly rapidly collapse into a pile of rotted timber and straw on the forest floor, marked only by the stove, the bath, the water pipes and the glass; and, as these things are inherently valuable and recyclable, I would imagine someone else will rob them out long before the house gets to that state. With reasonable maintenance, I believe the house could last — and be comfortable and habitable — in the long term. Sixty years at least, perhaps twice that; as long as a conventional modern house is designed to.
This house would not pass building warrant, and there are some good reasons for that. It has no foundations; it is (intentionally) very close to trees; it has some fire safety deficits. Notably, it would be impossible to get a fire engine to it in the event of a fire, but also there is no fire separation between the walls and the roof structure, and I have not yet fitted the fire ladder which I intend to fit from the rear window. And it seems to me that it would be very hard to draw up building regulations which this house would pass which would not allow very unsatisfactory buildings also to pass.
Modelling the change from rural to urban
This essay is about software, not the real world! If you're interested in my thoughts on real world rural policy issues, check the Rural Policy category on the right.
In the real world — in Northern Britain particularly, but I think this holds for many other places — there are three essential layouts of rural communities:
- Non-nucleated settlements, where dwellings are scattered at least tens of metres apart over quite a wide area; highland crofting settlements are typically of this form.
- Nucleated settlements, where dwellings are grouped closely around a central feature such as a village green or a pond; villages of this form are typically older villages, especially in areas of Anglian settlement. Rhonehouse is a good example locally.
- Linear settlements, which are a special case of nucleated settlements, where dwellings line the sides of an (often broad) street. These settlements typically are medieval in origin and reflect the runrig agricultural pattern — each house had inbye land stretching back from the street. Moffat, Lochmaben and Thornhill are local examples.
Populating a game world
(You might want to read this essay in conjunction with my older essay, Settling a game world, which covers similar ground but which this hopefully advances on)
For an economy to work people have to be able to move between occupations to fill economic niches. In steady state, non player character (NPC) males become adult as 'vagrants', and then move through the state transitions described in this document. The pattern for females is different.
Basic occupations
Genetic buildings
Building selection based on location
The objective of this note is to create a landscape with varied and believable buildings, with the minimum possible data storage per instance.
Like plants, buildings will 'grow' from a seed which has northing and easting attributes. These locate a position on the map. Again, like trees, some aspects of the building type selector are location based. Aspects of the location which are relevant to building type are
Tessellated multi-layer height map
This post describes a method for storing a very large landscape for a game world. A height map is the conventional method for representing topography in game environments. A height map is essentially a monochrome bitmap in which darker colours represent greater heights. This means the landscape architect can draw it easily in conventional bitmap editing tools, and it’s easy to convert into a three dimensional map which can be rendered, just by drawing vertices between adjacent points in the grid. However, if you use a height map for a game territory, then either you have a fairly constrained territory or else you don’t have much complex topology. I want a territory of at least a million square kilometres — that’s four times the area of Great Britain or three times the area of Germany.
Having topographical features only at the kilometer scale — a one thousand by one thousand array of heights — would produce a wholly unnatural landscape. Having topographical features on the metre scale would produce a much more natural landscape, but at the cost of a million by a million array, which pushes the storage capacity of current generation machines and thus leaves much less storage for the many other things I want to model.
One solution, if a height map is chosen as the preferred representation of topology, is to tessellate the height map. The problem with that is that sooner or later the player is going to think ‘I’ve seen this same landform before somewhere else’.