[MOD] Planet Roanoke, a/k/a all SMAC'ed up

woodelf · Apr 27, 2006

Guest01 said:
Can you add intense "deterioration effect" to start of the game (survival era)? I mean that productive capabilities of colony must be far inadequate to sustain size and complexity of given equipment at moment of foundation. In the beginning colonists actually rapidly consuming artificial environment that supports them. So, player gets a limited time span to revert downward trend before colony collapse. I guess such modification can add significant portion of realism to mod.

There's a fine line between realism and fun. That's the tightrobe we're trying to walk now.

As it is the instant your city hits 2 pop you have (most of the time) a health issue in your city. Ouch. That stunts the growth and sort of simulates deterioration.

We do have a lot of work to do and welcome suggestions and also implementation suggestions for the suggestions.

Follow the sig....

Padmewan · Apr 27, 2006

Our storyline so far for the first 20-40 turns or so is exactly what you describe: the colonists are cannibalizing ship parts and resources to scrape by, cobbling together crappy biosynthesizers for food, etc. Truthfully it's very atmospheric and realistic, but we are struggling with making it "fun" -- sitting around in your base not being able to breathe is not the makings of an exciting game :cry:

Please do try out the first Era, at least, and keep feeding us ideas or sign up if you want to pitch in... we need people with writing, art, code skills as well as people who are familiar with science and scifi (which, actually, I'm not!)

Guest01 · Apr 27, 2006

Suggestion - Fibersea.

Did you read Lem's novel "The Invincible"? There are several fascinating conceptions that can be adapted to idea of fibersea. Probably, novel helps you to write storyline of mod.

Look at
http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/dziela/dziela.htm

Full version (free):
http://greylib.align.ru/bookdetails.php?book=765&lang=1

Padmewan · Apr 27, 2006

That's very cool, thanks for the link. Unfortunately the second one doesn't seem to have any links leading from it; I see "The Invincible" but it's not a link to anywhere.

Regarding the storyline of this mod it's hard to think past what we know to what we don't know -- so it's really helpful to get suggestions like this to help expand our thinking. To quote from Clarke (as quoted in the game), "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The hard part about extrapolating into future/alien technologies is we're too anthro/earth-centric to think of alternatives to the way we think about biology, machines, etc. (Even now we still think of animals as "superior" to plants when both are equally evolved).

One of the scifi concepts I've absorbed from SMAC and am remixing is the "String Theory" / "Resonance" concept. I imagine these alien lifeforms existing within and using these wrapped dimensions in a way that defies our ability to comprehend -- the best we can do is represent them in our own, 3-dimensional reality, but they are not bound to that same reality. At the same time, perhaps these aliens do not understand our dimensionality either, and so the task in the last 2 chapters of the mod, assuming you make it that far, is to bridge this gap and reach some kind of Synthesis....

Anyway, would love to read that story if it's available... I suppose I could also, um, buy it. :blush:

Guest01 · Apr 27, 2006

Padmewan said:
That's very cool, thanks for the link. Unfortunately the second one doesn't seem to have any links leading from it; I see "The Invincible" but it's not a link to anywhere.

Oh, sorry. I forgot, that page in Russian. :rolleyes:

That's direct link http://rapidshare.de/files/7624230/Stanislaw_Lem_collection.rar.html (approx. 2,23 MB)

Enjoy :thumbsup:

woodelf · Apr 27, 2006

Guest01 said:
Oh, sorry. I forgot, that page in Russian. That's direct link http://rapidshare.de/files/7624230/Stanislaw_Lem_collection.rar.html (approx. 2,23 MB)

Enjoy

Well that makes it interesting.

The Great Apple · Apr 27, 2006

"Yes'm, we came out of hibe 30 clicks early, we did, and that's what did us in." The man looks old enough to have seen Planetfall.
...

Isn't a click (or klick) slang for a kilometer? Surely comingout of hibernation 30 Kms early wouldn't do that much harm on an intersteller voyage?

Sorry for picking at such a small detail, but it's been annoying me since I first read it!

Apart from that it all looks rather cool.

woodelf · Apr 27, 2006

The Great Apple said:
Isn't a click (or klick) slang for a kilometer? Surely comingout of hibernation 30 Kms early wouldn't do that much harm on an intersteller voyage?

Sorry for picking at such a small detail, but it's been annoying me since I first read it!

Apart from that it all looks rather cool.

Alright, just for nitpicking you have to suspend work on your mod and help us do python for a week. :whipped:

The Great Apple · Apr 27, 2006

woodelf said:
Alright, just for nitpicking you have to suspend work on your mod and help us do python for a week.

I could do... although you'd have to bear in mind that I would have absolutely no way of testing if it worked, and without a proper text editor it makes it quite a bit harder to spot when I've made a mistake, so you would have to be my bug-checkers.

This is why I'm not doing too much work on the 40k mod at the moment - there's no point in trying to debug two months after you wrote the code.

Leif · Apr 28, 2006

Lets see, my first nitpick, the first economic civic should be decentralized, just like normal civ, because planned is too good for a starting civic, it may be the first or second addition, but it assumes that someone is already in good enough controll of a society to tell everyone what to do, when after your spaceship crashes, things arn't going to be structured....yet. Also, seeing a workplace democracy would be nice (yeah yeah, trying to ease in the whole 'dictatorship of the prolateriat' thing, you know me), or just a civic that allows for unionization, while having another one that forces slave labour, or wage slavery, or some thing as that to counterbalence it.

I suppose the same goes for the goverment civic when it comes to power, first there are tribes, gangs, or even just a big group of people. So mob rule may be appropiate, then someone ascends to power, then absolute power, then scattered power, then equal power.

The graphics are wonderful and if I can think of anything elese you could add (or I could hunt down for you to add), I'll send it your way.

:borg:

Resistance is futile :borg:

Leif · Apr 28, 2006

woodelf · Apr 28, 2006

Thanks Leif. The civics are in progress (I hope) since the choices are limited. It's not easy to jot them all down when you're doing Era by Era in techs and some won't become visible until later down the road.

I'll check out that long list of files soon.

woodelf · Apr 28, 2006

A lot of those models are in game or will be. I think we're going to stay away from most SW stuff, but the At-st and another ship are in there as a probe. I hope to convince the others to include the AT-AT when smitty gets it done. I think if we attach Rabbit's helm/oxy pack to the guerilla that might work for a unit.

Keep the ideas coming.

Guest01 · Apr 28, 2006

I've just downloaded the mod and suggest to add readme to futher versions of download package

Leif:
>Lets see, my first nitpick, the first economic civic should be decentralized, just like normal civ, because planned is too good for a starting civic

hmm... small colony, hostile environmental conditions, insufficient productive base on the one side and nuclear reactors on another - and decentalized economy with it?

woodelf · Apr 28, 2006

Guest01 said:
I've just downloaded the mod and suggest to add readme to futher versions of download package

Yeah, we're still in the organizing stages, I guess. We'll get the file section cleaned up soon, but we're trying to make it easy to simply download the main update and then place the other files that aren't changing on top of it.

Guest01 · Apr 28, 2006

Another issue...
Seems like mod (.1471 version) correctly running only at 1280x1024 resolution (at least for me) with 1.61 patch. At lower resolution (1024x768) i've get "initialize renderer failure". And with 1.52 patch there are lack of buttons (for example, settler had no buttons at all).

Padmewan · Apr 28, 2006

Thanks for that info. I think I only run at 1024x768 res (so I can have a windowed interface for fast-switching) but I could be wrong. Weird! Will check on what res I use at home, but I'm glad you are giving this a thorough test.

Since the 1.61 patch came out we've only tested with 1.61. I have no idea why there would be no buttons with 1.51 -- I do know that we haven't modded the "atlases" yet so that popup messages show the pink circle.

woodelf · Apr 28, 2006

Guest01 said:
Another issue...
Seems like mod (.1471 version) correctly running only at 1280x1024 resolution (at least for me) with 1.61 patch. At lower resolution (1024x768) i've get "initialize renderer failure". And with 1.52 patch there are lack of buttons (for example, settler had no buttons at all).

And you have all of the files? Odd.

Gene, any ideas?

woodelf · Apr 28, 2006

Padmewan said:
Thanks for that info. I think I only run at 1024x768 res (so I can have a windowed interface for fast-switching) but I could be wrong. Weird! Will check on what res I use at home, but I'm glad you are giving this a thorough test.

Since the 1.61 patch came out we've only tested with 1.61. I have no idea why there would be no buttons with 1.51 -- I do know that we haven't modded the "atlases" yet so that popup messages show the pink circle.

Heh, I guess you beat me to the punch!

Leif · Apr 28, 2006

Guest01 said:
Leif:
>Lets see, my first nitpick, the first economic civic should be decentralized, just like normal civ, because planned is too good for a starting civic
hmm... small colony, hostile environmental conditions, insufficient productive base on the one side and nuclear reactors on another - and decentalized economy with it?

I still stand by my belief in starting out with a chaotic economy, for after a spaceship crash things wouldn't be structured. Power will shift around, things take time to settle down. But I'm thinking that the actual game starts nearly right after the crash.

[MOD] Planet Roanoke, a/k/a all SMAC'ed up

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Big Cheese

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