[Freeciv] Integrating/Interfacing Games

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have always been interested in relating games to each other, that is
quite likely what led me to find Unix so sensible: it never made sense to
me to have a game - let alone to pay money for one! - and not be able to
pipe the output of one game to the input of another, or add a mechanism
for transfer from game to game or place the games together into a larger
context.

DOS games always disappointed. Art of War for example looked like it ought
to be helpful for roleplaying game gamemasters to resolve large scale wars
that the players might not be interested in playing out with miniatures.
But such games generally lacked the documentation and facilities to allow
import of the economic and military values at start and export at finish
suitable for integration into the gamemaster's records.

This goal applies in two directions to Freeciv. One direction is to be
able to blow up a small area of the map to play it out in more detail at a
finer scale of play using either some other game or simply a copy of
Freeciv itself operating at a finer scale. The other direction is to be
able to integrate it with an interplanetary and/or interstellar game,
again either another copy of Freeciv itself operating on a larger scale or
a different game entirely, possibly one such as Stellar Crisis
http://alien.knotwork.com/sc/
which is also free open source software (in this case a module, written in
Pike script language, a MUD-type language, for the Roxen/Caudium webserver
- the webserver also being free open-source software).

Part of the object of the Proxima Centauri scenario
http://www.knotwork.com/activity/games/freeciv/
is to aim toward being able to follow the play of Freeciv after the Space
Race. It represents the landing on the new planet of the one or two
colonists (Engineer units accompanied by a Fighter unit in lieu of
explorer) sent in the space ship.

Another approach I have considered is that the sending of two colonists in
the space race makes the initial space ship seem rather like a trireme. It
has a limited range, it carries two units, and it would probably be lost
in space if it did not reach its target star in one "turn", that is, in
its one preplanned journey. So one very simplistic approach might be to
play with islands and regard the ocean as space, triremes as these initial
spaceships and so on.

Another free open-source game that may also be a good candidate for
integration/combination/interface is Xconq. There has apparently already
been quite a bit of work done in Xconq toward simulating Civ-type games
and there are some space scenarios for it also.

I have noticed at http://www.freeciv.org/ that in public games the Space
Race seems to be regarded as somewhat of a joke. It might be less so if
failure to get into space "in time" could end up by having your planet
invaded by a vast force from space.  ;-) Depending of course on where your
starting planet happens to be located within a larger map. One thing I am
interested in doing is setting up a method of surveying a saved game to
import a player who completed the Space Race into either a Proxima
Centauri type scenario or a larger scale Interstellar Empires scenario.
This may help give some meaning back to the Space Race.

Presently the Proxima Centauri scenario is not really giving the player
credit for the technologies they developed on the way into space. The
technologies that are actually necessary are mostly subsumed into "Basic
Industry" but any that include pollution flags are still separate in order
that pollution will come out the same if they recreate their industrial
base. It might be better to be able to use multiple pollution flags or a 
multiple pollution value for Basic Industry so that plastics and the
automobile could be also be subsumed, and better yet perhaps to have it as
a global flag so that basic industry need not be a tech at all but simply
be subsumed as "None". Although the way it is set up at present does allow
the possibility of choosing not to recreate the industrial base and thus
to avoid much of the pollution.

The Proxima scenario also does not know which governments and faiths were
developed on the homeworld, so it makes the assumption that merely having
heard of them is not the same as actually having a significant portion of
the population adhere to them or believe in them or practice them. Players
have to research them again upon arrival on the new planet. The initial
government is a Despotism with the title of the Despot being Captain,
presumably the Captain of the spaceship. If we could harvest players data
from the actual game in which they completed the Space Race we could give
them precisely the techs that they had on the homeworld.

Part of the reason behind wanting to be able to zoom in to smaller scales
as well as zoom out to larger scales is for Roleplaying Games. It has been
my experience that often players in RPGs are not interested in building
baronies and kingdoms and such, they just want to dungeon-crawl and
wilderness-adventure through a large and colourful world or universe. So I
have often wanted software that would help by running such large worlds
and/or universes but allow zooming in to very fine levels of detail
wherever and whenever an individual played character was involved. For
example on a Freeciv scale a unit containing a bunch of played characters
might be represented by a Diplomat unit, but the success or failure of the
Diplomat's mission would be determined by detailed roleplaying and fed
back into Freeciv, instead of being determined by the Freeciv game engine.

This would involve being able to flag any unit as containing one or more
played characters, and halting to ask for results any time such a unit is
involved in combat or, probably, issued any orders whatsoever. The RPG
players could then resolve the situation at their scale and plug the
results back in to the larger scale.

This is just an initial overview of the general ideas, although it does
point to at least one specific facility that would be required, which is
the flagging of units as special units requiring a stop to ask for input
from another scale before proceeding.

BB
MM

-- 
Got a website? Get 10,000+ hits a day FREE...
http://makemoney.knotwork.com/10000hits/