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’.
Turbine economics
Last week I had one of those experiences which felt at the time like small defeats but which actually are steps forward — although not necessarily in the direction I really want to go. Call it a tactical withdrawal. I moved my computer from the Winter Palace up to the Void. In the Void — the huge old cattle shed which forms the hub of our community-that-is-not-a-community — it can use mains power, rather than depending on my wind turbine. Also, it can use the landline broadband, rather than using my satellite connection. The truth is that at this time of year my wind turbine is not generating enough power for my day to day use, and as I am now running low on the money I earned last year and need to start looking for employment again, I need to use my computer (and the Internet) more.
So this is a post about the energy economics of living off grid.