An attempt at mapping using economics.

[Crayons]

That's absolutely brilliant!! I've watched the vid several times and , while it's no "Casablanca" it's fascinating trying to deduce Andy's motivations!
I'm wondering ig the path "fade" time is a bit fast? As it is at the moment he may not develop multiple paths? Would I be right in assumming that a "developed" pre-trodden, path has a saving of effort for Andy?
It might also be interesting to develop "soil goodness"? Soil near water being better than further away - and maybe factor in soil usage - so that Andy might start "rotating" his crops about a bit?
I say this as he seems to have settled at the junction of 3 "natural" commodities and walks to the fourth. He plants on the path to there. If he were constrained by soil quality to plant nearer water it might open more paths?
Just my thoughts!
Speaking of which - I'd love to be able to see Andy's thoughts. Some of those God games give the little folk "thought bubbles" - Theme Park, Theme Hospital etc. A status bar at the bottom might be nice with his current "desire" factors perhaps!?
Keep up the excellent work! I may not always feel qualified to comment (most of the time probably!) but I keep coming to this thread to see if something new is showing.
Are you going to add a Mrs Andy at some point?

[Redrobes]

Yes the path fades a bit quick and your also right in that its going to bias him based on the cost of taking the path or going cross country except that I haven't coded that bit yet and he takes the most direct route all the time so it does not build up much. Also I think more people will trod it down a bit more. The path coding is quite involved so im leaving that for a short while but its soon on the list of things to do. Maybe I should do that one next.

The soil goodness is a great idea. Id have to add a new custom variable tho. At mo he plants seed and then it grows slowly. He can make a tend crops transaction to make them grow faster so you will see it change from the yellow stripes of crops to the green hatch of fully grown harvest. If the harvest is not collected then it drops in quality progressively until it rots into nothing and you see them vanish. So if it rots then it could stay at 100% but if harvested then it could drop 20% or so and modify the growth rate. If he is really hungry and has no more carried harvest then you will see him plant crops like crazy until one harvests. So with poor soil he would be forced to plant more and more to get one harvest. All non planted dirt could gain quality slowly.

A Mrs Andy... Andi ? Yes in time. At mo there is no gender differences at all so it makes no difference. Id be more keen to see Bob (or Bobbi !) make an appearance and maybe there would be some chance to trade / barter and see how two people together interact with stuff.

I could add those status bars for one chosen character at the bottom I think. I reckon that would help debug it a bit more. Another set of stats that would be good to see is his valuation of the market. As he cuts a tree down he values logs less and then makes planked timber instead and then values them less. Then he builds a house then suddenly he gets all interested in timber again.

By the end of this run its hard to see what he's going to want to do next. He has a house, crops and water to drink. If I run it longer then he builds a second house. So its probably time I expanded the list of items and transactions too so that it gets more interesting. For example id like to add "extend a shack" to make it bigger or improve it till it looks like a house. I want to start seeing streets appear but I think were a long way off of getting to sensible street layout yet.

[mearrin69]

Cool stuff. Very fun to watch the behaviors...please post more if you get interesting stuff up.
M

[Redrobes]

Thanks, ill get a bit more going then ill post a beta just to play around with. Remember theres no fancy UI or source code for these tho. It runs a script and then you can ask it to boot out an image like the ones I post. But you can get to see all of the parameters and desires etc. Its not all that useful at this point.

[Redrobes]

I have some more anims to post as I was working on it again last night. This time tho ill give you some links instead of attaching a zip as they are about 2Mb to 4Mb each.

This time I debugged it and optimized it a bit more to handle more than one person. So this is another anim for 1 person with the new code and then same code but with 3 and then 10 people in it. This time however they have all been speeded up 10x so you get a frame for ever 10 turns. Its now generating the data faster at about 1000 turns per sec but if I have to set it to export the image each frame its a lot slower at about 10 per sec. Still, speed is not looking like an issue now.

A couple more things. I have marked squares that are owned in a red border. So you can see which ones people have reserved. Sometimes they pay attention to reserved things and sometimes not. Its based on the actual transaction being done. I have set the bashing up rock to aggregate as being an item which is now owned so that they all need to go to a different heap and do their own work now.

Anim4a
Anim4b
Anim4c

Its interesting that they seem to generally clump the houses together but thats not been programmed in at this point tho I will be adding code so that its cheaper to expand an existing house rather than build a new one. Also they are still not following pre-trodden paths yet.

[Marken4]

And it's going to be totally AWESOME

[tilt]

one could also argue that sense of security, social interaction and easy of trade would be reasons to live closer together

[Redrobes]

Because I know you like more movies...

I put in the code to make people stick to paths. Its using a brute force technique which should work all the time and produce optimal results except that I cheat with the algorithm to make it a whole lot faster by dropping one of the outer loops which to those programmers out there will know that means a lot. So its not optimal results any more - just pretty good. Its doing 400 turns per sec with 3 people at mo.

The first is 5 characters, 1 frame per turn.
Second is 3 characters 10x speed
Third is 3 characters 100x speed so we can see what happens in the longer term at the location.

Anim5a
Anim5b
Anim5c

Next I need to put in some crucial changes to the pathing. A) People should not be able to build a house on a path and B) people should not be able to walk through someone elses house. Then we might get some form of streets forming. Its from here that things start getting exciting !

[Crayons]

I'm loving this!
Some thoughts.
The food thing is rather too "easy" I think. At some point I feel that there should be seasons and stockpiling of food - fields need to become as permanent a feature as buildings (almost). Many country lanes end up following field boundaries (when they aren't following contours, rivers, sheep on a grass "high" and so forth) - as you know! Once fields become more permanent "features" then concepts of crop rotation can come into effect. Obviously traffic shouldn't cross fields with crops but could use fallow fields - thus permitting road evolution to occur more slowly in agricultural areas.
I think the roads should persist even longer.
Besides not allowing traffic (therefore roads) through buildings, the opposite should also apply - no building on roads (of age "x" TBD)?

[Redrobes]

I agree with you though I think a field for one person is about all that you need. When the size of the map increases then I think we will see more people needing food. Its very hard to persuade the app to do anything speculative so storing food is difficult. The only way I can do that is to make the cost or value of stored food more than current harvest. Also, when I get a mill it will start consuming harvest at a larger rate to provide flour so I think then it will force farmers to plant more and you will see more squares in crops.

On the houses and paths front I agree. I said that we need two things. No houses on paths and people cant walk through houses. I will try that out real soon and see how that goes. I will also much increase the cost of people walking through a field but not stop them doing so. Then maybe that will prevent planted areas becoming paths and hopefully steer people around them. Might be able to try that tonight.

Its a dilemma whether to stop a recently used field being used again as a field to make it a permanent feature or whether to down grade its potential because of the requirement for crop rotation. I also don't want to have them so permanent such that a growing village will wrap around fields and thus have the village green being a cabbage patch. I think that tho people should walk around a field if possible, if they do walk over one then not only should the path value increase but the crops on it should decrease. If someone plants a field right on a narrow opening then people will trample it all away rapidly.