Thought timeline

Me: What do you think of the shopping complex

Davis: I'd pay $50

Me: Yeah but it's not going to be like that. You start off with $100 game money and you can put more in.

I have to get lots of people to play then

Otherwise, if I make it single player and sell it for $50 I have to write AI, which is hard

I really don't know if I should make it single player like Civilization and sell if for $50 or make it an MMO and get money that way

I probably won't be able to make enough money to pay for the servers if I make it an MMO because other MMO's like World of Warcraft have monthly subscriptions

What do you think of the different planets

I'm going to add a refinery next

I don't know if I should make it so that you micro-manage all the workers or if they are automated

You'll pay me $50 when I'm done, hopefully next year

I wonder if the AI should start building next to you or on some other planet

Next to you probably

So the AI will try to complete an economy with you (having all the buildings for a full economy) and if they're against you, they'll try to develop on their own or with other AI

How many AI players should there be

I'll add 16

Roads will cost $0.01

I'd go to SFU but I don't want to bother applying

Going to gym

So should resources be localized?

If roads cost $0.01 that means money is DESTROYED by being forever taken out of the economy

Roads should cost concrete and labour

But if resources are localized and must be transported by truck and trucks can only travel by road, how will they get the concrete to an unfinished road?

Maybe you can just be near the tile to transport the concrete to it

But if there's no roads at the beginning of the game and no trucks, how will the first roads be made? The trucks need to travel to the concrete plant and then the unfinished road

26 minutes left to walk on the treadmill

So there will be a global supply of resources that you start off with that can be used anywhere in the world

But how will you build on other planets?

You'll have a transport ship that has trucks with concrete to build roads

And the same way you'll travel over water to build on other islands

But how do you instruct a truck to get concrete if they're automated

Maybe you can right-click on concrete plants to order them to get concrete

Will ships use up fuel like trucks?

How am I going to get an automated economy, especially AI controlled, to work? I never even got the economy to run for more than a few minutes before breaking down

In the previous version of the game

10 minutes done on treadmill

Davis: Sorry for no texting was making dinner come move and live with me

Me: Mmm I dunno I don't think mom wants that

How will the resource display bar work? I was thinking of having it add up the global and all the localized resources to display

It kind of loses its usefulness after you run out of global resources

Because you can't readily use localized resources

I think I won't add the localized resources to the resource bar, that makes it easier cuz I don't have to keep track of them

When will the AI know to attack and declare war?

And it'll be possible for the AI to fight between each other

Maybe when they detect they are stronger

I'll have a button to go to the next unit with action or movement points left

Like in Emperor of the Fading Suns and Civilization

Gah it's hard to work on the refinery because I have to fill a 2x2 tile square with details and there's so much space to fill up

I'm looking at photos of refineries from the internet

There's all these little pipes

And it will be hard to texture map

And it's just 1 building, I still have a bunch left

I'm going to post all these messages in my blog

Like a thought timeline

Say something

5 minutes left on the treadmill

Done treadmill

Going home to work on the game

Davis: Fuck what your mom wants your 22

Me: Giving the laptop back at NCIX cuz it's a piece of crap with Internet problems

Gonna wait a few weeks to get a laptop like we had before

Did you get a new laptop yet?

ASUS sucks

There were periodic lags in counter strike that stopped when I restarted the computer

And livestream didn't work

Davis: No laptop yet keep spending money instead of savings it but I might finance one from dell. Either an XPS or alien ware

Me: I'm not spending, we gave this one back

Finance one?

My laptop

http://www.ncix.ca/p...ufacture=Lenovo

Treadmill, 26 minutes left

10 minutes done

I have to fix the refinery and remove the extra vertices so I can UV map it

15 minutes done

That refinery is a piece of crap

Gotta fix the texture

20 minutes done

25 minutes done

Gonna try to set up the old desktop downstairs when I'm done

Theres barely any room downstairs and it has to be downstairs because there's no cable upstairs

Done

My game is like civilization but with different planets

I get my laptop on Tuesday

Davis: Yeah buts its shit get XPS or Alienware

Me: Too late

Getting lenovo w530

Look it up in magazine

Davis: I saw it and it sucks

Me: It's a workstation class laptop

It's good for games too

Davis: Yeah but for $10,500 I can get a desktop that's almost like a server. 64gigs of ram, liquid cooling. 4 quad core processors, 5 terabytes of hdd and 1 terabyte of ssd, top of the line graphics card, 3.0 USB, and more

Me: $10,500 is a lot more than $1,750

Davis: I know but 64giga of ram!!!!

That's insane

Me: It's not good for game development thought because you won't know when your game will be laggy on other peoples computers

Davis: Yeah but playing games on extreme settings will be easy

[later]

Me: John carmack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBCaMwqsAS4

Are you watching the video?

Gym time

My game seems unreasonably complex

Not marketable

I mean, a real game company wouldn't risk developing it cuz it's so complex and the returns so little

I gotta simplify it somehow

I dunno how long it will take to process a turn in the game

If it's more than a minute... The game's not playable

But I will know that only after I've completed it

5 minutes done

[...]

The pathfinding is going to require a huge grid

There maps of planets are 1024 tiles in length, with each tile 16 units in length

If the minimum unit radius is 0.1 units, there's going to be (1024x16/0.1)^2 grid cells

That's 163,840 x 163,840

So I need a better solution

11 Minutes done

Maybe I won't allocate all the cells directly but will add them as I go along

That will have a big look-up cost though, cuz it takes longer to cycle through a linked list

15 Minutes done

Maybe that's how everybody does it because they talk about a "list" of open tiles and closed tiles

I remember using vectors or dynamically allocated arrays to allocate all the tiles before and it caused crashing

I wonder if it will be different this time

20 minutes done

It'll probably be different because I'm not allocating all those cells at once

25 minutes done

Done

[Next day]

Gym time

I installed Linux on the old desktop

Gonna use it as a server

5 minutes done

I'm having trouble accessing the server externally so I asked for help on the CentOS forum

10 minutes done

I get my laptop in 3 or 2 days or somethingI'm inspired by the PlayStation network
I'm going to make Corporation-States an MMO like I wanted originally

Too late to get an XPS or AlienWare

But I thought they might have the same problems as ASUS

Cuz lenovo didn't have those problems

15 minutes done

20 minutes done

25 minutes done

I fixed the vertices on the refinery model and UV mapped it

Now I just need to make the texture

Done

[Later, by email:]
Server is working now
http://24.87.135.215/

I'm inspired by the PlayStation network
I'm going to make Corporation-States an MMO like I wanted originally