I was listening to NPR today, about the Ted Talks and the idea of natural systems. And then I had an epiphany.

They were talking about the biosphere and things like that, closed systems where everything factors in and these systems adjust to meet the changing situations, automatically.

Think about it in this way, you have a simple biosphere with grass and grasshoppers. The grasshoppers eat the grass. They multiply. But as they do, they eat too much grass. With the grass mostly gone, the grasshoppers die back. The grass, given a chance to grow, comes back. The grasshoppers begin their slow repopulation.

And that’s kinda neat – the ecosystem is in a constant readjustment to meet its balances. And that was my “ah ha” moment – what is a game other than a closed environmental system! Too often, games are simplistic things.  All those 4X games were stupid in that the game played the same, regardless of whether you were small or large. They don’t adjust to meet your size. The challenges remain the same; you just have more resources. Your advantage multiplies. Once you hit that roll, you cannot be stopped.

And that’s where this Gaia-feedback loop should happen. Once your grasshopper nation becomes huge, the game should stack challenges on you. It should get harder and harder until you are hitting a wall (like real life). Nothing can grow infinite.

We’re just starting to think ideas up for our first multiplayer, ATF (After the Fall) but I think I’ll have to not focus on the game as a balance between players, but more as a post-apocalyptic balance that shifts as the situation changes. So we’ll see.

Dynamic universes make for dynamic relationships make for dynamic games, don’t you think?

My co-developer, Jesse, and I love coop games. Playing as a team is far more fun than playing against a game by yourself. If you win, you BOTH win. Nobody loses (unless, of course, you both lose 🙂 ).

Twenty years ago, we did this with Sim City and Railroad Typcoon, sending each other the saved game (via modem) and playing a proscribed lenght of time before sending it back. Nothing like being handed a city to manage where the nuclear plant just cracked open.

Anyway, I had the idea last week to do this with Solar Trader. I’d start the game, go into the spaceport, pick up a cargo (and suffer my little adventures). Then I’d lift ship and make my run. If I made it to port (and didn’t land with the gear up or antenna out or simply just crash), I’d toggle open the hanger bay door and…

Send the game to him.

And then he’d work a cycle and send it back.

I noticed that on Facebook, I have a new entry and a new data file waiting for me. This is great. It’s like live fiction, where what happens happens to you. So tonight I’ll be playing my round.

You can follow our efforts on the GRID SIMS FACEBOOK PAGE. Who knows – if you ask nice, we might even let you coop with us.

And I think our next game (likely After the Fall, will have live coop built in.

After all, a friendship is too good to waste.

Been working on Solar Trader recently. Got all of Jesse’s new location setting code plastered over my adhoc placement routines used for the various space missions. After all, it stands to reason that most astoriod missions will be “beltward” and that if “Christ on a Comet” is going to direct you to one of those icy balls, it will be one they’ve been tracking on its whip around the sun, one coming roughly this way and ready to receive lambs. Also, FedUp missions are better timed, and if you step lively, you can actually run inner system delivery missions now.

Further improvements – there is now a lockable fannypack available (to ward off pickpockets) and reflective longjohns (to lower the deadlyness of rooftop laser-snipers). And since snipers are drawn by your freetrader fame, so will those with cargos that need prompt shipping and “no questions asked”.

We’re going to playtest for about a week (I’ve got one specific bug I’m chasing) and then we’re going to be putting NPC shipping into play. And that, I figure, will make it a whole new solar system.

Keep watching this space for details!

Had an interesting chat with my co-gamer, Jesse, last night.

He was showing me some new prototype work he’s developing, where SQL servers can be used to adminsiter a multiplayer game. That means, when we get started on our next effort, ATF (After The Fall), you will be able to play against other people realtime. Which is really, really cool.

And while he was showing me this, I suddenly realized that Solar Trader was missing something. I’d written some really cool code to allow ships to black out, and that pursueing ships might track a false lead. That was all in an working, and somehow I’d managed to lose it in a versioning fumble. I simply couldn’t believe it.

So there you have it. While Jesse is touching the face of Code Gods, I’m moving backwards in ST.

Merry Christmas everyone! And I know of no better gift than free game software, namely the largest and most complex game Jesse and I have undertaken, Solar Trader.

This one is a tough one – you’ll have to learn how to pilot a ship across our moving solar system, crossing the belt and keeping your ship functioning. Also, you’ll need to learn all the cities on all the planets, locating those traders you need to ship for, and who will make you the FreeTrader king should you survive to move every cargo. It’s hard to do, and you’ll find a lot of ways to die (or worse, end up with an impounded ship, trapped on some planet).

And don’t think you’ll learn a “path” to play through – the cities and cargoes change each game. Even the minor dynamics of the ship (power use, maintenance effects, morale, everything) change slightly.

So, the game is up. It’s all for your enjoyment. But please note that we are in a first release Alpha state. It might do strange things, even crash – we’re still pulling bugs out. Just let us know what you see and we’ll try to fix them. The best place for this is the “Time Tripper” Facebook group. That link and the game are available for download at the link below.

And let me know if you win (or if you die in a funny manner) – I’d love to hear it (post it on FB for everyone’s enjoyment). Meanwhile, Jesse and I are adding all those other ships you’ll see in this very dynamic universe!

>>>Solar Trader Page<<<

I should have known from the gloating edge to his voice that he’d found a bug. On our last Tuesday call, Jesse had me bring up the game and go to the city stuff.

See, the way it works – there are huge encounter databases in Solar Trader. All sorts of weird shit can go down. And part of this is how much time it costs you. Stopping to consider a market stall does not take the same amount of time as arranging to have a pod of Earth slaves loaded. In our data, there is a minimum and maximum time. The time it takes is randomized between these values. But because of a typo, I was never setting the top end. So, instead of something taking 30 to 60 minutes, it would take between 30 and 0, which would come out in the formula as 30. Everything was done very, very efficiently.

Of course, once the gloating was done, I sat down that night and fixed it. I didn’t think to consider what this meant, but suddenly the average time taken for a task jumped (in the case above, by an average 15 minutes). Now my ship-chores (find a cargo, get the old one removed, the new one on, and then ungrade and fuel the ship) were taking nearly all day (these were big tasks, and had huge variations that had never been used before). I couldn’t get everything done.

So this morning, I bumped the values to average around the prior minimum time. This should make the game play roughly as it had before. I guess, at least. I’ll be grabbing up my jacket and taking my ship out for a run, and see how long it takes.

Hopefully we’ll have the alpha version on the pad for Christmas.

Now that you know Beta 1 is coming out, here is a preview for the many ways the game can end in Solar Trader. I’m including a screenshot with the results of my games over yesterday and today. Yes, I played 9 games, but as you see – it didn’t take long, I didn’t make it very far in any of them.

The city game can be tricky. Some times bad events happen (mugged, ran away, didn’t get back in time to get my ship out of dock and got impounded).

Some times poor choices are made (robbing the free trader of his fuel chit seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the cop team showed up, I was sent straight to jail).

Some times to avoid one bad end (got off earth with a cargo without getting impounded for delays), you take a risky chance. My cargo was a FedUp mission from Earth to Uranus. Range of my ship 175 – range to Uranus 175. I almost made it – I did my orbital insertion to Uranus with enough fuel to land, enough power to last 4 more days, but no air. For 3 days I was in orbit trying to line up on the sub-orbital platform with the air gauge on zero. I needed 2 more turns and I would have made it. Alas, the end was Aphix (Asphyxiation)

There were also lots of suicides – generally after asteroid strikes that damage the ship and morale at the same time, though one was due to a solar flare that hit me just as I was doing my deceleration burns – had to burn or I’d miss the planet, but 3 days in the radiation were just too much…

And if you think this is hard, just remember, right now space is empty. After Beta 1 is released and as you are play-testing, development will continue on adding non-player spaceships to the solar system. Some will be friendly (space tugs to tow you back to port), but most will be unfriendly (MaoCorp freighters taking pot shots at you if you get too close), and some will be downright hostile (pirates and assassins).

Click on the picture to see it clearly:

With our learning experience with Pits of Seth 2 (a game that was supposed to be an easy upgrade and turned into a can of Magic Worms), I’ve gone back and added what we learned into System War One. This game really is improved without all the excel tabby stuff all over it. Anyway, it’s a nice little minesweeper game you might really enjoy.

Go to its download page here!

Now this pissed me off.

We had our POS2 release, which went well enough. Well, well enough until lifetime friend Matt tried to load it into Win8 (with neither Jesse or I are cursed with) and it threw an error. Turns out that Win8 is not backwards compatible, no not really. And boy, was that a pisser.

Found a solution online. Tried it on my machine – ran okay. Posted it to Matt and he tried it. Worked okay. Pulled out my old XP system and it actually ran there too. So we seem to have a fix now.

If the game is running on your system and you are happy, leave it. But the new version has been placed on the POS2 page (and, what the hell, here as well). Enjoy!

(And thanks, Matt, for identifying that problem. I’ll have to go back and retrofit some of the older games).

2.10 Download here: PitsOfSeth2