Tuesday 11 February 2003

Pic of the day: Each of the small fields in the picture (and there are many more) is one "city" or county. Together they constitute a region. And in each of them, you can move in characters from The Sims to live along with hundreds of thousands of other imaginary people. But that's not enough for me.

Detail on demand

I bought a computer game today. I don't do that often these days, unlike when I was younger and poorer. These days, I generally have what I need already. I do buy upgrades to the games I habitually play, but not new games unless they seem to contain something qualitatively new. For instance, I never bought Sim City 3, as I already have Sim City 2000. But today I bought Sim City 4.

I don't have the time to play it competitively. In so far as I spend time playing games, this will mostly be DAoC and Go, possibly some Morrowind. But I want to explore this game, even though it is said to run very sluggish even on expensive high-end machines. I don't want to play it that long anyway. I want to see how they have implemented a feature I have written about since well before I began this journal. There seems to be some degree of Detail on Demand; but I may be wrong.

This concept became clear to me as I imagined the kind of strategy game to be played in the next century (which is where we are now, obviously this was some years ago). I imagined a game that I named "Colonization", a step up from Civilization. (MicroProse soon used that name for their game of colonizing the Americas. I never really made another memorable name for my imaginary game though.)

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In my Colonization, the scenario was the discovery of alternate time lines and jump points that let you pass people and equipment to the undeveloped worlds branching from ours millions of years in the past, worlds without human life but with all the generic resources of our world. You would be able to select by % how different this world would be from ours. You would get a set amount of capital, depending on difficulty level. This would be used to buy equipment and hire people, then send them to the other world. The transport would be very expensive, so you would have to choose wisely. Would you have lots of people and hope they could make equipment over there, or would you have few people with very high tech equipment?

As you arrived, you would play by default a high-level strategy game, with only statistics and satellite photos. However, you could at any time look closer at everything, right down to visiting your colony, walking around the camp and talking to your people. These people would not exist until you chose to visit them. But once you did, they would exist, and the layout of your camp would exist, and the terrain around it. These things would be saved on your hard disk. As long as you had free space on your hard disk, you could theoretically trek around the entire planet, and learn to know every one of your citizens on a personal basis, visit their homes and discuss their careers. Kinda like God visiting Adam in Eden, you know. ^_^

It goes without saying that as your colonists breed and expand, you would meet the wall. But most likely you would not be interested in learning to know thousands of people personally, or you would not be spending your time with your computer. So, in practice you would probably only visit a small part of your planet and meet a few people at any given time, while the rest continued to remain faceless data tables and maps. Thus, the demand on the system would be limited by your demand for detail. Thus my name for the concept, Detail on Demand.

I know I've written about this before, but there has never truly been any programs that implemented it. From what I read, Sim City 4 has come closer than anyone else. I don't really know until I have played it a bit, though.

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There definitely seems to be some DoD thinking in this version of Sim City. The actual city screen you work in is only one county in a matrix of counties, a region. The economic development in the whole region influences your city / county, and the other way around. You can play all of them, but only one at a time. That's something, but not quite what I looked for. I'd like to play the whole region on an abstract level, and then dip into each part as needed. The same with the MySim feature: You can place out a few Sims in the city and they will write you letters about what happens to them. This can give you a clue as to what happens in your city, but it is a rather limited feature. What I'd like to do was playing a game of something like Civilization, then zoom in on a city and play Sim City, then zoom in on a house and play The Sims. And have all parts interact with each other.

Oh well, perhaps in Sim City 14...

I expect to write more about Sim City 4 after I have played it a little, if I find it worth it.