I respect the hustle, but as a professional gameplay programmer : the fuck did you expect ? Piling systems upon systems does indeed increase the game logic’s complexity exponentially. Probably a big reason why there are so few (good) immersive sims even though it’s quite the popular genre.
I will still respect him for attempting
“Now, I understand why so few companies have attempted to develop a life simulation game. The challenge isn’t just additive the more you try to build—it’s exponential. At a certain point, finding bugs in this vast world we’ve created feels like playing tag with invisible ghosts.”
He’s not bragging; it’s honesty. I’m thankful he is sharing the experience. I know totally what he’s talking about. I remember trying to make a simulation of reality in the wc3 map editor in elementary school. Add the weather so the plants grow. Tie growth variables also in to deer eating them. wolves eat the deer. So everything needs hunger variables. But already we start having the ‘exponential growth’ he is talking about: because what about the Weather and the Deer? And the Weather and Wolves? Add aspect of the world for one type of object (weather for plants), and suddenly you have to figure out how or whether it relates to everything else you have (Deer and Wolves). Now let’s say we add villagers and Structures. Every time we add something, we have more nodes to consider the interrelations of.
It’s easy when there are few systems and few types of things (like a cardgame of creatures with atk and def), but it escalates quick and does exactly what he’s saying the more systems you try to accurately include and farther toward ‘full life sim’.
So im just a noob, but I see clearly this is what he is conveying to us. (probably cuz i tried a similar path in elementary school. if i remember correctly i ran in to this same issue, scale was too big too big project and i switched to something else. it exponentialed quick; just like he says)
edit: i bet he wasnt brave as much as did not forsee the exponentialness aspect and wanting to aim high caused him to fall in to it
Hey another kid who grew up wc3 modding! I did a ton of that too.
I made a tower defense map in the Starcraft map editor when I was a kid , but it was based off of anti air rather than anti ground like the other TD maps at the time. I got it working pretty damn well (at least IMO) but I didn’t have internet at the time and that was on my dads work laptop so it sadly got lost.
I don’t think I could recreate that now if I tried, crazy what you can do as a bored kid with too much time.
That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.
God damn, that sounds awesome! Those map editors were seriously impressive for their time, so many cool things you could do with them. I also liked making “campaign” maps but with hero units and harder AI (SC base ai was too easy but you could set it to be harder through the map editor) or those “maze” maps where you have to keep the units you start out with alive through a bunch of different encounters.
Ahh good times!
For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅
So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.
o the memories lol.
<3 both of u. I was Pixie_Tails on US east and west and in one of the big mapmaking guilds on east. I look back and think wc3 was the mentally healthiest part of my childhood. My most fun thing was a game like dota but with a huge natural map and a minute at the start for everyone to choose their castle locations. Like you could choose to be on a hill, along a river, etc. Then there were diff biomes to choose your hero from and the hero choices spawned like pkmn and there were rares. and choosing base unit types. then it became like dota where units spawned at castles and attackmoved to other castles. Was epic.
My weakness was unit and ability balancing since it didnt interest me so i never did it.
anyway, we thought up and made these as kids. i think that’s the coolest thing
That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.
I’ve read from a few people who’ve done similar sorts of things that the solution to this problem is to just have everything track everything to begin with. Hunger level, heart rate, mood, everything you can possibly think of to track, and then just have everything else inherit from that global class. A lot of the values will be zero for some objects, but that’s okay, after all a storage crate doesn’t need a mood, both at some point in the future maybe you want to add an emotional box, and your code will definitely handle it now. Otherwise you have to go back in and alter everything every time you make a slight change.
An emotional box? Enough about my wife!
LOL, forgot about that tacky bastard.
He sucks, but it was such a good set-up for a shitty Dice Man style joke, I couldn’t resist.
A more complicated but ultimately faster approach is using a structure like an Entity Component System. You build an entity (deer, person, plant) out of components that are just data (health, hunger, mood), and then each type of component has a corresponding system that updates all the components at once based on other values. It’s somewhat similar, but you save space on unnecessary components not being added, and it packs the data together in way that is faster for the computer to iterate through.
Making a system like this one day is my dream. I’m not in game dev and I’m probably never going to make a playable game but I naively believe that if you organize this well enough in advance, the moment it starts clicking together would be amazing. If you define all the individual actors in a flexible enough way, eventually the simulation should just ‘click’ and start functioning on its own, right? :P
For example, you dont need to code the specific wolves+rain interaction - you just need to code “if vulnerable/tired - find shelter” and have rain affect the living creatures in that way. It doesn’t matter if there are deer or sheep in the area, “if wolf hungry” logic should just say “find something with meat to eat nearby”.
Then again I know enough about programming to know this is extremely naive and it’d probably be a million times more difficult if I ever got around to doing it. I don’t even know where I fall on the dunner-kruger graph yet, but it’s an interesting thing to think about for me.
This video series sounds like it might be up your alley. Guy documents his attempts to simulate a goblin society and ecosystem.
According to the dwarf fortress developer the hard part isn’t the code exactly it’s the graphics which is why he doesn’t bother with them.
Oh I empathize with that. I tried unity/godot and code part would always be fun and easy, I love that… models, assets, animations break my brain however. I wish I could just not bother with them but it’s such an important part of the experience, arguably the most important one
So everything needs hunger variables
T̸h̶e̴ ̷f̵o̶g̴ ̷w̴a̷s̴ ̸h̸u̵n̵g̴r̸y̸,̸ ̶i̴t̷ ̵a̸t̶e̵ ̵t̷h̵e̶ ̸w̴o̸l̷v̷e̸s̴
Dwarf Fortress goes that deep. They once had to fix a problem where cats died from alcohol poisoning. Dwarfs in a bar would spill their drinks, the cats would walk through the puddles and subsequently lick their paws to clean themselves. It’s crazy!
I think the bug was that a splash of water had the same alcohol content as a cup.
Yes that was the bug. After all it makes sense that cats would clean their paws and get a bit of alcohol in their bodies. Kind of bizarre to think though that the system was sophisticated enough to track grooming behavior but not quantity.
It really goes to show how stupid computers actually are. They just follow your instructions regardless of how insane they may be
What is amazing is how our universe and existence seems to be governed by a few physics laws (which we don’t fully understand).
Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.
that would be a super cool touch in a game
Secret of the Haunted Forest
Player eventually realizes the reason for the unexplained corpses is the hunger mechanic applies to the fog too.
I’m just reminded of the fog men in kenshi
Is it gonna be similar to second life or something?
Seems more like Sims 3-style, but if you cranked up the graphics up to 11.
And that everyone is a kpop star with high fashion.
The Sims 3: K-Pop Stuff Pack.
I believe it’s supposed to be more of a spiritual successor to The Sims.
Depending on the monetization scheme that might be a nice change of pace.
I wonder which game mechanics of the sims titles are patented as of today.
Here’s an idea: Just make Conway’s Game of Life but with absurdly good graphics. 😌
I’d buy that.
Anyone that declares that he himself is recklessly brave doing anything is a self-promoting ass.
Bravery is doing a thing that scares the hell out of you. The reckless part is being brave when it’s foolish. He’s saying he was foolhardy. Probably doesn’t know the word exists.
I don’t think he wasn’t praising himself there. I interpreted it as calling himself foolish.
Games are very difficult software to create. The only reason publishers like EA or Ubisoft can get away with pumping theirs out at an rapid (and unhealthy) pace is because they have a massive team
You have to understand that telling other people how brave and cool you are makes them think you’re an idiot though, right?
You have to have a certain amount of bravery and humility to program because failure is with you at every step of the way. I know. I do this shit as a hobby.
Am I the only one that interpreted it as him calling himself foolish?
No, that’s how it was intended, and how most people read it.
Some lemmy users really love getting mad xD. Can’t believe I thought I would say this but reddit gaming subs are not this bad. Idk if it’s just me but It doesn’t excite me to check the comments anymore.
Hes not praising himself, I was recklessly brave going into the lions den, isnt prasiing yourself, its admonishing yourself, like you took on some insane challenge without thinking
Best example is the US president
You don’t understand stand this is No Man’s Sky meets Spore with a touch of Daikatana.
What do giant radishes have to do with anything?
To be fair, at least No Man’s Sky followed thru with all the updates down the line. Should’ve launched like that, but at least they added it all for free after the terrible launch
Ohh no i won’t become nobody’s bitch anymore.
Oh, is the developer Peter Molyneux’s protoge?
Not yet but that’s absolutely road map
