SMAC RPG/Roguelike

[Cryopyre]

Hello fellow SMAC fans! I'm currently working on developing a SMAC roguelike/rpg. Inspired by DF/SMAC/GURPS/DnD and other systems, I'm trying to build a fun RPG which will take place on the world of Chiron!

I'm coming to you for help, though. I have a map of planet, but it is barren. Are there any canonical maps which you can provide? Ones which are late-game/threshold-of-transcendence and yet have every faction thriving to some extent. Creating a map on my own wouldn't be too difficult, yet having one to work off of would save me a lot of time. I want a nice balanced map so that a player can choose any faction they please.

Further requirements:

Gaians have taken Sparta Command
Spartans own a coastal base
University has conquered some of Gaia's bases
Gaians own some of monsoon jungle
Sparta has lost Assassin's Redoubt to planet-life
Hive population at least *looks* like they have Ascetic Virtues
Spartan population at least *looks* like they have The Clone Vats
Gaian terraforming at least *looks* like they have The Weather Paradigm
Miriam, while still present, has obviously been under constant enemy incursions (I imagine this won't be hard . Also, preferably they'd share a hostile border with The University, although this is not canonical.)
A decent amount of seabases.

Also, if possible:
The Hive has many bases (I plan to cut his territory and denote some of it to the Free Drones)
Zakharov has a moderate amount of bases, possibly including a few on a peninsula (I plan on turning a peninsula into a Cybernetic Consciousness enclave)
Spartans have a knot of sea bases (the coastal bases for Maritime Control Center not included, this knot is, you guesses it, for the Pirates)
An island with Morganites (Data Angel enclave)
No bases around the ruins and fungus still prolific there, I'll probably manually place the cult in that area.

I'm not including the Progenitors out of a personal dislike of the inclusion of the aliens. But the game relies heavily on XML and they should be easy to slap in if you feel like it.

I can do this myself, but it would help me save some time.

If anyone wants in, let me know. I also could use help in getting sprites for tiling (if you've ever played DF I plan on using a tileset in a similar fashion). Any other programmers are welcome to help, this is my first big programming project and I'm only in the initial stages of development. I'll share my work any time you'd like. I'm programming in Python with extensive us of ElementTree and Pygame.

I make no promises but I'm committed.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Cryopyre]

Oh, also, I'm in no rush for this map, which is why I posted a request for it early. World building is going to be one of the hardest aspects of this project.

 

[Petek]

Hi Cryopyre,

Sounds like an interesting project! Some clarifications and comments:

1. Do you plan to use the standard SMACX engine? If so, there's a problem with your specifications. You listed 10 factions in your requirements. The standard game supports at most 7 factions and there's no mod that increases this number.

2. You refer to a map, but I think you're looking for what we call a scenario. A map includes land, sea, pods, specials and other static features. A scenario is a map that also includes factions and other custom conditions.

Is the faction limit a deal breaker for you? If not, then it would be possible to create a scenario with most of your requirements. Whether someone would be willing to put in the work to do so is another question, though.

 

[Cryopyre]

Hi Cryopyre,

Sounds like an interesting project! Some clarifications and comments:

1. Do you plan to use the standard SMACX engine? If so, there's a problem with your specifications. You listed 10 factions in your requirements. The standard game supports at most 7 factions and there's no mod that increases this number.

2. You refer to a map, but I think you're looking for what we call a scenario. A map includes land, sea, pods, specials and other static features. A scenario is a map that also includes factions and other custom conditions.

Is the faction limit a deal breaker for you? If not, then it would be possible to create a scenario with most of your requirements. Whether someone would be willing to put in the work to do so is another question, though.

1. No. The setting is from SMAC, but I'm programming the game independently. I understand the 7 faction limit, which is why I don't require the other 4 factions be present, just that their are bases present in the University, Morgan Industry, and Sparta which look natural but I could reassign later when building the map in game.

2. You're right, I'm looking for a scenario, not a map. But I'd like the scenario to be on the large map of planet so it's more canonical.

I am not pressed for time, so I'm hoping someone can make the scenario eventually. I'll even do it myself, but help is always appreciated!

 

[Ari Rahikkala]

Okay, I'm curious. Curious but apprehensive.

One reason I'm apprehensive - and I'm putting this first because it's it's something unimportant to mention on the way to stuff that actually counts - is because you mentioned you're using "ElementTree and PyGame", which is kind of like saying you're making a car and you've already got a tire model and a windshield material picked out. Yes, they're essential questions, but they're just not the essential questions. I would have been happier to hear you have a moving '@' on the screen - it might be a unicycle rather than a car, but hey, at least it's a wheeled transportation device.

But that's really far too little evidence to cast any real doubt on your programming readiness so I'll just continue on to the important stuff:

I'm interested in helping you. Well, unlike you, I can make promises - I can promise I won't commit . But I'm curious. You asked for a map of Planet with, presumably, at least factions, bases, base populations, base facilities, and terraforming in place. And SPs, I guess. Maybe faction relations and military units.

That's all well and good. I could do that (well, again, I promise not to commit myself, but it sounds like it could be fun). But... I don't know whether it would actually be what you need for your game. Worldbuilding isn't about setting up the large-scale political state of the world at a single instant. It's about the people you could meet in that world, it's about how the world came to be the way it is, it's about the character of the different places of the world. And above all, when it's worldbuilding for an RPG, it's whatever you need to actually inform the mechanics of the game.

I could imagine a game where just the scenario would be what you want, for instance if it's a heavily procedural game where you can be some kind of a supersoldier in Planet's wars (so that you actually change the world's political state). If that's what you are doing... well, I'm still interested! (though I think a game like that would likely be far too big to implement for one guy) But if it's something different... tell me what it is. What kind of a game are you going for?


(I'd previously written a post where I made a few assumptions that I now realise weren't very well justified, here it is in spoiler tags anyway: )

Spoiler :

Are you sure about using the huge map? I'm just thinking... wouldn't it be cool if you could go to any base and they would all have their own unique quirks, owing to how they started their development out fairly independent and disconnected? Well, if you fill the huge world with bases, there will be far, far too many to do that. A "smaller" world would be easier to fill with interesting stuff.

Granted, it does get a little bit odd with the normal-sized map as well because then even bases that are "close" to each other on the game map are several hundreds of kilometers apart. You really have to think of them more as nations under the faction's "empire" and less as cities under the faction's "nation". I think it could make a decent amount of sense, particularly when you're in the endgame - I think by then the land bases at least in heavily terraformed and de-fungused areas would have gone from strictly enclosed bubbles to sprawling urban regions anyway.

To put that in more concrete terms: Sure, Razorbeak Wood's six hundred kilometers from the nearest base, but that's just how the faction leadership managed to hide the existence of its vast brood pits from both of the rest of the faction and the rest of the world, and that in turn was how Assassin's Redoubt fell in the Gaians' secret war. The pits have since been converted into part of the local Centauri preserve, but the misuse of Planet's defense system has never quite stood well with Planetmind, and empaths find Razorbeak Wood a uniquely dark and disconcerting place for a Gaian base. Still, things have changed. The trip from Silverbird Park used to be be an adventurous, days-long rover ride over wide fungus strands and rocky terrain; these days it's twenty minutes in the magtube, and the only downside is that you're going too fast to see the sculpted forest vistas and the many, many communes of nature lovers living in their tiny villages.

That was basically one thing said about a base that would translate into a crunch effect (for instance, make it harder for empaths to control native life near that base). Now consider that in order to make a base an interesting place, you probably want to say more than one thing about it. Perhaps Razorbeak Wood was also the place of the Gaians' first and only effort to build a thermal borehole, and the project wasn't replicated since it was found out that the increased temperatures caused too many ecological changes? Perhaps the base's citizens refuse to participate in the war with the University, and in fact allow for the base to be used for isolation testing of components of the Voice of Planet project?

You get the drift: It already takes some effort to say something interesting about a base, it's going to take a hell of a lot of effort to say something about the hundreds of bases you can fit on the huge map. Oh, and the effort scales superlinearly with more bases, since you don't just create each one from scratch, you have to take into account what goes on in the rest of the world too. You could always say "oh, there's just a few 'interesting' places in the world, I'll just autogenerate the rest", and then the players will ignore the autogenerated content and you'll have wasted the effort of writing the generator in the first place. There's a place for procedural generation, but there's also a reason why, say, the Elder Scrolls series has pretty consistently moved toward smaller gameworlds with more interesting content in them.

Could you tell us more about what kind of game you're going for? And since you said you could show your work anytime, well, show what you've got so far and where you're planning to go next?

 

[Cryopyre]

Okay, I'm curious. Curious but apprehensive.

One reason I'm apprehensive - and I'm putting this first because it's it's something unimportant to mention on the way to stuff that actually counts - is because you mentioned you're using "ElementTree and PyGame", which is kind of like saying you're making a car and you've already got a tire model and a windshield material picked out. Yes, they're essential questions, but they're just not the essential questions. I would have been happier to hear you have a moving '@' on the screen - it might be a unicycle rather than a car, but hey, at least it's a wheeled transportation device.

But that's really far too little evidence to cast any real doubt on your programming readiness so I'll just continue on to the important stuff:

I'm interested in helping you. Well, unlike you, I can make promises - I can promise I won't commit . But I'm curious. You asked for a map of Planet with, presumably, at least factions, bases, base populations, base facilities, and terraforming in place. And SPs, I guess. Maybe faction relations and military units.

That's all well and good. I could do that (well, again, I promise not to commit myself, but it sounds like it could be fun). But... I don't know whether it would actually be what you need for your game. Worldbuilding isn't about setting up the large-scale political state of the world at a single instant. It's about the people you could meet in that world, it's about how the world came to be the way it is, it's about the character of the different places of the world. And above all, when it's worldbuilding for an RPG, it's whatever you need to actually inform the mechanics of the game.

I could imagine a game where just the scenario would be what you want, for instance if it's a heavily procedural game where you can be some kind of a supersoldier in Planet's wars (so that you actually change the world's political state). If that's what you are doing... well, I'm still interested! (though I think a game like that would likely be far too big to implement for one guy) But if it's something different... tell me what it is. What kind of a game are you going for?


(I'd previously written a post where I made a few assumptions that I now realise weren't very well justified, here it is in spoiler tags anyway: )

Spoiler :

Are you sure about using the huge map? I'm just thinking... wouldn't it be cool if you could go to any base and they would all have their own unique quirks, owing to how they started their development out fairly independent and disconnected? Well, if you fill the huge world with bases, there will be far, far too many to do that. A "smaller" world would be easier to fill with interesting stuff.

Granted, it does get a little bit odd with the normal-sized map as well because then even bases that are "close" to each other on the game map are several hundreds of kilometers apart. You really have to think of them more as nations under the faction's "empire" and less as cities under the faction's "nation". I think it could make a decent amount of sense, particularly when you're in the endgame - I think by then the land bases at least in heavily terraformed and de-fungused areas would have gone from strictly enclosed bubbles to sprawling urban regions anyway.

To put that in more concrete terms: Sure, Razorbeak Wood's six hundred kilometers from the nearest base, but that's just how the faction leadership managed to hide the existence of its vast brood pits from both of the rest of the faction and the rest of the world, and that in turn was how Assassin's Redoubt fell in the Gaians' secret war. The pits have since been converted into part of the local Centauri preserve, but the misuse of Planet's defense system has never quite stood well with Planetmind, and empaths find Razorbeak Wood a uniquely dark and disconcerting place for a Gaian base. Still, things have changed. The trip from Silverbird Park used to be be an adventurous, days-long rover ride over wide fungus strands and rocky terrain; these days it's twenty minutes in the magtube, and the only downside is that you're going too fast to see the sculpted forest vistas and the many, many communes of nature lovers living in their tiny villages.

That was basically one thing said about a base that would translate into a crunch effect (for instance, make it harder for empaths to control native life near that base). Now consider that in order to make a base an interesting place, you probably want to say more than one thing about it. Perhaps Razorbeak Wood was also the place of the Gaians' first and only effort to build a thermal borehole, and the project wasn't replicated since it was found out that the increased temperatures caused too many ecological changes? Perhaps the base's citizens refuse to participate in the war with the University, and in fact allow for the base to be used for isolation testing of components of the Voice of Planet project?

You get the drift: It already takes some effort to say something interesting about a base, it's going to take a hell of a lot of effort to say something about the hundreds of bases you can fit on the huge map. Oh, and the effort scales superlinearly with more bases, since you don't just create each one from scratch, you have to take into account what goes on in the rest of the world too. You could always say "oh, there's just a few 'interesting' places in the world, I'll just autogenerate the rest", and then the players will ignore the autogenerated content and you'll have wasted the effort of writing the generator in the first place. There's a place for procedural generation, but there's also a reason why, say, the Elder Scrolls series has pretty consistently moved toward smaller gameworlds with more interesting content in them.

Could you tell us more about what kind of game you're going for? And since you said you could show your work anytime, well, show what you've got so far and where you're planning to go next?

I understand your hesitation, and I'm a novice programmer, which is why I said that I'm making no promises. At the moment what I have is the ability to create and save characters, and mod in new factions/races/skills, I have some images already, but there's a bit more I want to finish before I move on to dungeoneering, so I think I'll polish it up before sharing some final screenshots.

I'd probably have moved on to core gameplay already, but it's been hectic at my workplace ever since Windows 8 came out.

I'll be back on the ball this weekend, hopefully.