I was daydreaming yesterday, and I thought of this. I''ll lay it out in a somewhat organized fashion: You are, at first, an average citizen of a fictional island nation. There are a few political groups in the nation (arbitrarily, the Capitalists, Communists, Green, Intellectuals, and Religious) that all want to take over the Presidency, held by a man not of any political group. So do you, as a matter of fact. Also, every group has a few statistics - Integrity (bribes, heh heh), Player Support (woo a group into being your fwend, muahahaha), Cash, Leader, Second-in-command, third-in-command. The kicker is - and this is to make up for my WOEFULLY bad graphical skills - there''s somewhere around one million different people in the nation. (Feasible, on a 128MB computer, and on less if the person''s got a decent hard drive for swapping out) Every person has the following statistics: ID Number Name Age Job Salary Integrity Capitalist Support Commie Support Green Support Intellectual Support Religious Support Player Support (A person might be a group person, but then he also might like the player Mother Father Children I figure the game will randomly create 300,000 the first time it starts a new game, and I''ll research realistic birth, death, and im/emigration. You''ll be able to bribe the police chief to look the other way while you send a big supporter with a low Integrity to go kill someone - but you have to then be careful, because a high supporter with a low Integrity might decide to kill you. Everything would be intertwined, my main idea. So whaddaya think?

Its a great idea, but sadly it isnt new.... Take a look at Republic.

If I was feeling like coding a lot of names and such, since this isn't graphical - I could make somewhere around...oh, three, four million, probably more for a 500MB swap. I just put down a million because that's how much I could do without a swap file on a 128MB box. A lot of the stuff I saw there in the info I found on Republic I was thinking of as well. Personally, Republic looks like vaporware to me, or something that needs God in a box to run. A million different citizens, in full 3D polygonal-ness? OK, let's just set aside three gigs for it...or set it up for those nice DVD people. Heh heh heh.

Edited by - Edward Ropple on October 22, 2001 11:14:56 AM

To simulate the one million people, you need only store the mutable items. The other items can be regenerated as needed based on a seed associated with each individual. This seed need not be stored either, it is merely the index value of the person.

Also, many of the values could be stored as demographic values. One template individual could represent the demographics of 5,000 people.

If you wanted to actually simulated their movements, that is another matter.

You could always combine a couple elements of your idea and an idea posted.

You want every person to be accessable because they can be part of the plot. But that isn''t easy on low end machines. So a fix I would suggest is have 10,000 individuals, and the rest are in demographic groups. That way you have more than enough fodder for storylines (killings, underlings...) but it is easy to control masses of people.
You could even have a variable membership rate in each group, that way you can move one person from one group to another and not have to change 5,000 people at once.

If you did it right you could have 5,000 key characters, and have the other 5,000 change based on the demographcs of the area.
That way when you move around you will always have "real" people that represent the people of that area to interact with.

Jason Mickela
ICQ : 873518
E-Mail: jmickela@sbcglobal.net
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"Evil attacks from all sides
but the greatest evil attacks
from within." Me
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