Author Topic: Request for crowdsourcing help: procgen market item names (huge update 4/10!).  (Read 24417 times)

Offline x4000

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I'm cool with changing all of that around, too.

Honestly if we had a way of just coming up with, say, 1000 unique names for each list, that's fine also.  Aka, making the names not be procedural even though the underlying stats and so forth would be.  I don't think there would be more than 1000 of a given type of item created during a game, and if we had to then we could go to roman numerals after that.  Or adjectives, depending on the thing.

So if we had a "Phaser Blaster" as a military tech name, then we could have a variety of adjectives to apply to it.
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Offline ptarth

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  • I finally figured out what sccuddly hugd means.
  • I've been having problems grokking the market, but my current guess is that it is a way of generating cultural artifacts for use a bartering items in trade. That is to say, the player will trade all 6 seasons of Xena:Warrior Princess for the Plasmoid Death Ray Technology. Did I finally get it?
    • If so, then I also finally understand how the names will work. They are names use for the creation of the player's race's literature and works of art. So the names would be names from the player's race.
  • If all of this holds, then it seasons reasonable to split the task in two.
    • Task 1: Create 1500 items for each list. Crowd-source modifications/error checking, keeping the originally generated item and the new change. Arcen would then select as many of those items as they want in game as a quick fix.
    • Task 2: Continue to define and specify the grammar, frames, and lists of filler words, accounting for the correction made while doing Task 1. If the generation actually creates good enough items, then this would be swapped in place of the lists. If not, then the 1500 lists may be more items than any player would ever see, and so would be an adequate (if inelegant) solution.
  • If this all holds, then I think the only real hold-up for auto-generating lists is the creation of a list of Proper Names (Earth culture would be reasonable, especially if we used multiple cultures) and then the military tech frames and word lists.
Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Offline x4000

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  • I finally figured out what sccuddly hugd means.

Haha, oops.  It should be able to say scraped properly now, lol.  I've been meaning to fix that censoring thing on that word for a bit.

  • I've been having problems grokking the market, but my current guess is that it is a way of generating cultural artifacts for use a bartering items in trade. That is to say, the player will trade all 6 seasons of Xena:Warrior Princess for the Plasmoid Death Ray Technology. Did I finally get it?
    • If so, then I also finally understand how the names will work. They are names use for the creation of the player's race's literature and works of art. So the names would be names from the player's race.
Yes, pretty much.  Except it's not just the player's race, it's also stuff being created by all of the AI races as well.  You as the player can buy or license stuff from the AI, and they from you.  Specifically you can agree to be an arms supplier for "Greater Lasers of Mordor" or whatever, and they in turn supply you with "Bleeding Shields of Camp Cannan" or whatever.  Joke names, of course.

Overall there are a number of categories of stuff:
- Broadcast: this stuff is television and radio programs.  Anything from news reports to reality tv to edutainment to whatever.  PG, of course.  But it's basically cable channels that you might subscribe to, or might get subscribers to.
- Invention_ConsumerProduct: things like fireworks, soaps, ipads, lawn equipment, whatever.  Stuff that is sold to individuals.
- Inventions_Military: weapons, shields, and other physical military equipment.  Not vehicles, as those would have to be on the map visible.  These would all be armaments for soldiers or vehicles or buildings or what have you, not actual full things.
- Philosophy: philosophical ideas ranging from Plato to Nietzsche, but all fictionalized of course.  The pursuit of Truth from a variety of angles both good and bad.
- Writing_Fiction: mostly novels for entertainment.
- Writing_Nonfiction: Scholarly writings about specific things.  So for instance it might be describing psychological experiments, or the habitat of some new insect that was found, or the chemical properties of x molecule when in y conditions, etc.
- Writing_Periodical: magazines of various sorts.  Might be entertainment or pop culture, might be more serious publications, it varies.  Mostly in a middle ground of not being too scholarly and not being smutty.  So it's a bit more high-brow than broadcasts, but this isn't Science or Nature or any of those sorts of journals, either.
- Writing_Poetry: these would range from little soppy sonnets all the way up to epic ballads of the tales of great warriors.

  • If all of this holds, then it seasons reasonable to split the task in two.
    • Task 1: Create 1500 items for each list. Crowd-source modifications/error checking, keeping the originally generated item and the new change. Arcen would then select as many of those items as they want in game as a quick fix.
    • Task 2: Continue to define and specify the grammar, frames, and lists of filler words, accounting for the correction made while doing Task 1. If the generation actually creates good enough items, then this would be swapped in place of the lists. If not, then the 1500 lists may be more items than any player would ever see, and so would be an adequate (if inelegant) solution.
    • If this all holds, then I think the only real hold-up for auto-generating lists is the creation of a list of Proper Names (Earth culture would be reasonable, especially if we used multiple cultures) and then the military tech frames and word lists.
Something along those lines would probably work, although I'm curious as to your thoughts based on the above information that I just shared.  My thoughts are that it's going to be awkward if the burlusts are creating soppy poetry or if their broadcasts sound like something that are overly newsy or something.  So having some thematic sub-groupings of things by tone would likely be good.  Not assigned to specific races, but saying "these are sonnets" and "these are epic battle poems" might be good to make two lists.  NOT both being 1500 lines long by any stretch, but some division of it.

Then we'd need some proper nouns and/or adjectives as appropriate for the lists in question, with different rules per kind of list, as you noted.  Since this could vary by race, it's something that we'd want different proper nouns by race in some cases, or different adjectives.

For instance, if there was a general broadcast named The {0} Show, then we might have a "hostile nouns" list that the burlusts plug into that sort of thing, which would include words like "Murder" and "Knife" and "Laser" and so forth.  We might have an "underwater nouns" list that the yali plug into that same thing, with words like "Seaweed" and "Coral" and "Eel" and so forth.

And then there might be other groups of broadcasts that look for proper nouns instead.[/list][/list]
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Offline Captain Jack

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My thoughts are that it's going to be awkward if the burlusts are creating soppy poetry or if their broadcasts sound like something that are overly newsy or something.
Don't see how, they love chocolate and it's one step from dark mocha fudge to "Freckles dappled her face like the stars beyond our reach".  :D

I'm actually in favor of leaving a few odd bits in as attention checks. Or you could build a special event around the example you gave, with the Burlurst standing in for Vogons.

Offline x4000

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Hahahaha, Vogons do have the monopoly on poetry that makes your brain crawl out your ears, don't they?
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Offline Captain Jack

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Only until someone undercuts them. I imagine the Burlurst have a very literal interpretation of "cut-throat capitalism". Or--god just imagine--the Acutians might see room for a growth industry. I mean Fifty Shades got a movie so...

Anyway, I make the case that there is space for deliberately inappropriate market items, with caveats.

Offline x4000

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Sure, that makes sense.

Roses are Red.
Poems are Nice.
There's a bomb in this book.
Now you are Dead.

Sounds very Burlustian to me. ;)
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Offline ptarth

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Well, I get the name generation task, so that's good.
Unfortunately, the entire market system still doesn't make any sense to me. Mind you, I also have an focus on underlying system mechanics, (per my TLF obsessions). I'm trying to understand the volume of items and the naming system in regards to market system and economic contributions to the player's race, and I keep coming up short.

My problem is that it seems like the market system is combining too many different things, and I can't really imagine how it works. For example a single military market item (e.g., the AK-47 and its numerous produced units) would be a small fraction of the total amount of the total military market for a race. Likewise a single poetry novel would be a pittance compared to a single military item. The number of copies of 50 Shades of Blue that would have to be sold to make keeping track of individual items worthwhile seems out of scale. You'd see something like 1000 different poetry book items would have the same impact as 1 military weapon items. And a 100 military weapon items would have the same impact as a single type of livestock sales to Burlusts.

On of the big problems with M003 was they added too much detail without any real difference. You'd see technologies that increased missile speed by 5%, and it made all the research feel trivial. From what it seems so far, this system has the same problem. You are either representing a massive class of items by a single item name (e.g., The NotDaily Show represents ALL (or a large segment) of broadcast media), which is a bit weird, because a generic label Media Items Class II would make more sense. Or you have a onslaught of individual items, each minute effects, which makes any single item trivial. Bionic Dues had this problem for me in mid-game. I was hard pressed to sort through all of that gear to find the best gear. Instead of optimizing (which does my little black heart good), I'd run with the same set of gear for a couple of missions, until either I was starting to slow down in killing things or couldn't take the inefficiency any longer. It wasn't as fun as I was hoping it would be.

In my search to try to verbalize my problem, I ran across The Atlas of Economic Complexity. It allows you to look at the categories of items and their contributions to trade levels on an import/export basis per country. It's pretty cool. For example, it will tell you that in 2012 Angola exported $1922 worth of umbrella or walking stick parts. It combines resources as long with commercial goods, which I thought was the difference between the Market and the Resources in tWiM, but you can still isolate things to get some perspectives.
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all/show/2012/

The CIA Fact Book is also a great source of information: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
For example in Niue a large portion of its GDP comes from exporting postage stamps to private collectors.

TLDR Summary
I don't understand the purpose and instantiation of the market system. tLF, Bionic Dues, and AWWW1/2 all suffer from having too many too similar items with minor differences, and it seems like SBR might suffer similarly. I think it lowers the appeal of the game to a general audience. However, I'm a single outlier perspective, and it might just be my imagination.



On to the topic of the generation. The specifications seem reasonable. Having racial characteristic profiles would be a first step towards being able to parse things better. So for example, Burlusts have a high aggression trait and a low philosophy trait. So you'd see them offering a wide variety of customized weapon technologies and books about such technologies. In constrast, they would have very few philosophical works, most of which are at a rather primitive level of thought (whose main used might possibly be to wrap fish) and perhaps involving power dynamics via kinetic exchange. By defining what characteristics the races have, we could then rate or sort the word lists by those traits. Then use weighted probabilities of each race to select the specific words for their racial lists. You could also have preferences for types of market items, so you'd see the Burlusts produce more and be more interested in weapon items, especially the esoteric weird ones, while they aren't interested in delicate Skylaxian perfumes.

Quote
Something along those lines would probably work, although I'm curious as to your thoughts based on the above information that I just shared.  My thoughts are that it's going to be awkward if the burlusts are creating soppy poetry or if their broadcasts sound like something that are overly newsy or something.  So having some thematic sub-groupings of things by tone would likely be good.  Not assigned to specific races, but saying "these are sonnets" and "these are epic battle poems" might be good to make two lists.  NOT both being 1500 lines long by any stretch, but some division of it.

So I don't see a major problem with the generation, the addition of racial characteristic lists would make things relatively straightforward. Fleshing out the races or letting the forum have access to some of the more fleshed out information about the races would also be nice. For example, I really don't have any idea how the Spire feel about Sit-Coms or Jellyfish.

Quote
Then we'd need some proper nouns and/or adjectives as appropriate for the lists in question, with different rules per kind of list, as you noted.  Since this could vary by race, it's something that we'd want different proper nouns by race in some cases, or different adjectives.

For instance, if there was a general broadcast named The {0} Show, then we might have a "hostile nouns" list that the burlusts plug into that sort of thing, which would include words like "Murder" and "Knife" and "Laser" and so forth.  We might have an "underwater nouns" list that the yali plug into that same thing, with words like "Seaweed" and "Coral" and "Eel" and so forth.

And then there might be other groups of broadcasts that look for proper nouns instead.

Yep. That should be straight forward. There are two nice part about arranging things based on race characteristics instead of defining the characteristics of the words. First, it allows words to be multifaceted. Lasers are both weapons and elegant photon based artistic tools (as opposed to shotguns). Races that find aesthetics and/or war appealing would both like lasers. Secondly, it allows gradients in racial characteristics. So the Skylaxians might be 80% interesting in science, compared to the Evuks who are 100% interested in science.
Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Offline wwwhhattt

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Could probabilities be attached to the frames, so that more distinctive frames turn up less often than more generic ones?
There could be any number of 'The Daily {0}'s or '{0} gun's without any problem, but too many 'Romancing the {0}'s and 'An Enquiry Concerning {0}'s would seem weird, possibly immersion breaking.

And for the inclusion of racial names, could we get a list of names from TLF to add to the spreadsheet?
If there will be names and the different races have different interests, then the spread of authorship throughout the races should reflect that - so if Skylaxians only have 80% interest in science compared to the Evucks 100%, then presumably there would be more scientific things written by Evucks than by Skylaxians.

I quite like the idea of dissident Burlust striking out against their tyrannical warlords by writing horrendously sweet pastoral poetry.

Offline ptarth

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The Last Federation Racial Name system can be obtained using in game testing and referencing some text files. I think this list is pretty accurate.

Acution - [two characters]-[two digit number]  (all upper case)
Burlust - [3 letter syllable (2 consonant, 1 vowel) taken from BurlustNameParts.txt][another syllable from same list] (title case)
Peltian - [2 letter syllable (1 vowel, 1 consonant) taken from PeltianNameParts.txt][another syllable from same list] (all lower case)
Evuck - [2 letter syllable (1 vowel, 1 consonant) taken from EvuckFirstNameParts.txt] [4 letter syllable (2 vowel, 2 consonant, occasionally 1 vowel 3 consonant) taken from EvuckSecondNameParts.txt][another syllable from SecondNameParts] (first name lower case, second name, title case)
Skylaxian - [5 letter syllable from SkylianNameParts (2/3 vowels, 3/2 consonants] [Roman Numerals](title case)
Andorian - [letter][number][letter][number](all upper case)
Outpost Names contains lots of names for use as outpost names
Boarines - Specimen [4 digit number]
Thoraxines - Thoraxine Queens don't name themselves
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Offline x4000

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Unfortunately, the entire market system still doesn't make any sense to me. Mind you, I also have an focus on underlying system mechanics, (per my TLF obsessions). I'm trying to understand the volume of items and the naming system in regards to market system and economic contributions to the player's race, and I keep coming up short.

My problem is that it seems like the market system is combining too many different things, and I can't really imagine how it works. For example a single military market item (e.g., the AK-47 and its numerous produced units) would be a small fraction of the total amount of the total military market for a race. Likewise a single poetry novel would be a pittance compared to a single military item. The number of copies of 50 Shades of Blue that would have to be sold to make keeping track of individual items worthwhile seems out of scale. You'd see something like 1000 different poetry book items would have the same impact as 1 military weapon items. And a 100 military weapon items would have the same impact as a single type of livestock sales to Burlusts.

Quantities don't come into play here.  Rather it's a matter of "do we supply AK47s to you, yes or no, and how much do you value that."  You have to have a certain manufacturing capacity to supply AK47s to a race, but again there's not quantities involved in the transaction.  The AK47s, meanwhile, are basically a procedurally-generated technolgy in the Civ sense -- they have some buffs that they give you for having that market item in general, and they give a buff to whoever you are making them for while you are supplying them.  In return you get money and goodwill and whatnot back from the other race.

Similarly, they might have 50 Shades of Blue that they are willing to sell you copies of, or they might have a new philosophy that you outright buy or sell one time (once that knowledge is transferred, that's it, in those cases).

Different kinds of market items give different sorts of benefits, but they are all basically like procedural techs.  Exactly how many of these you will see in a given game is a question still, but my intent is for it to not be too many so that they remain valuable and so that they aren't in your face constantly.  THAT said, the amount will vary greatly based on whether you are focused on the market aspect of the game or focused on some other area.  Same as with the military -- you might do a lot of fighting, or comparably little.

But either way, it's all about the "procedural techs" here, not about quantities of items or whatever.  There's more to it than that, but that's enough for now I'd think.

One of the big problems with M003 was they added too much detail without any real difference. You'd see technologies that increased missile speed by 5%, and it made all the research feel trivial.

I'm quite sensitive to that problem, and that's one of the things that my dial-tuning is involving.  How much you can do on a turn, how big of an impact this and that has, etc.  I actually cut 34 technologies from the main tech tree, combining them into other techs, because I felt like I was getting too many techs too quickly, and each one had too little impact.

Previously I had done a similar thing with the social progress system, because I felt like I was getting too many of those with 36 levels of social progress.  More recently I realized that just having 8 categories of social progress gains was not exciting to me, and even with less granular improvements per level I was just not excited by the system.  So I'm in the process of switching that system around into something that is actually based heavily around the skill trees in Dying Light, which I've been playing a lot recently and find really compelling.  It has some similarities to the Culture stuff in Civ 5 as well, without being too close.

I haven't gotten into the balance testing on the market items yet, I'll be honest.  Those are more middle-game and after, and I haven't gotten there yet except militarily.  It's a big game, and that hasn't been my first focus because it's not likely to be the first focus of new players.  But you don't need to worry about that winding up in a state that is frustratingly granular, because that's something that probably bugs me more than you. ;)  I have absolutely zero patience for that.

From what it seems so far, this system has the same problem. You are either representing a massive class of items by a single item name (e.g., The NotDaily Show represents ALL (or a large segment) of broadcast media), which is a bit weird, because a generic label Media Items Class II would make more sense. Or you have a onslaught of individual items, each minute effects, which makes any single item trivial. Bionic Dues had this problem for me in mid-game. I was hard pressed to sort through all of that gear to find the best gear. Instead of optimizing (which does my little black heart good), I'd run with the same set of gear for a couple of missions, until either I was starting to slow down in killing things or couldn't take the inefficiency any longer. It wasn't as fun as I was hoping it would be.

Yep, understood.  Here's the thing, though -- are you American?  I think if you are (I am), it may skew your view somewhat.  We have a ton of TV shows, for instance, that we export to all the countries in the world.  But how many TV shows from, say, Kenya do we watch?  If Kenya had a show called Broken Bad that everyone just loved, it's entirely reasonable that's their only Broadcast export.  It's not saying that's the only TV show in Kenya by any stretch.  But the other countries all have their own culture and so forth, and this is the only TV show that actually rises to a level of notability and hops the divide.

If you look at arms manufacture, that's a better representation.  A lot of European countries make a lot of planes and tanks and whatnot.  And they maintain those internally, for the most part.  But some of them make a particular model that is so good that they sell those to others; but that's not to say that's the only type of plane or tank or whatever that they make.

Does that make sense?  I'm not trying to simulate an entire global market -- that would be incredibly boring.  Instead it's a matter of the trade items that rise to such significance that heads of state discuss them.

In my search to try to verbalize my problem, I ran across The Atlas of Economic Complexity. It allows you to look at the categories of items and their contributions to trade levels on an import/export basis per country. It's pretty cool. For example, it will tell you that in 2012 Angola exported $1922 worth of umbrella or walking stick parts. It combines resources as long with commercial goods, which I thought was the difference between the Market and the Resources in tWiM, but you can still isolate things to get some perspectives.
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all/show/2012/

The CIA Fact Book is also a great source of information: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
For example in Niue a large portion of its GDP comes from exporting postage stamps to private collectors.

Cool resources!  Those are definitely way more broad than I'm looking for, though, because they are focused around entire market segments, whereas I'm looking to represent key market leader items in given segments.  Show me your most amazing car, Belgium, not every car you make.  Etc.

tLF, Bionic Dues, and AWWW1/2 all suffer from having too many too similar items with minor differences, and it seems like SBR might suffer similarly. I think it lowers the appeal of the game to a general audience. However, I'm a single outlier perspective, and it might just be my imagination.

I actually agree with you on that assessment with all those games, and it's something that I am, as I said, extremely sensitive to.  Part of the problem was me not playing those games enough in a direct fashion, because I get frustrated with that level of minutia pretty fast.  I playtested all those games extensively, but doing "unit testing" versus whole playthroughs, is a very different thing.  With AI War and SBR my testing methodology is very different, and one of the very first things I found with my "dial turning" stuff for SBR was a need to adjust the granularity of stuff.

I had already made the market items pretty non-granular in anticipation of not wanting to be bugged all the time, though.  As I noted I have yet to really test those in proper play -- just unit testing so far -- so I don't know if it will feel too granular or not.  If it does, then I'll be dialing that so that it feels proper before any testers ever get their hands on it.

On to the topic of the generation. The specifications seem reasonable. Having racial characteristic profiles would be a first step towards being able to parse things better. So for example, Burlusts have a high aggression trait and a low philosophy trait. So you'd see them offering a wide variety of customized weapon technologies and books about such technologies. In constrast, they would have very few philosophical works, most of which are at a rather primitive level of thought (whose main used might possibly be to wrap fish) and perhaps involving power dynamics via kinetic exchange. By defining what characteristics the races have, we could then rate or sort the word lists by those traits. Then use weighted probabilities of each race to select the specific words for their racial lists. You could also have preferences for types of market items, so you'd see the Burlusts produce more and be more interested in weapon items, especially the esoteric weird ones, while they aren't interested in delicate Skylaxian perfumes.

Yep, there's all that sort of thing defined.  Various races don't even produce certain types of items, and various races have literally zero interest in certain types of items.  The thing is, I'd like a system that is more flexible than trying to make a race-specific list for each thing.  What if we add more races in an expansion?  What if we decide that the Burlusts actually do have a philosophical bent?  Etc.  I'd rather have things like adjectives and nouns that are per-race that can be used across multiple item classes.  So if a burlust noun was "blood," you might have "Fifty Shades of Blood" and "Blood Rifle" and "A Treatise on Blood" or whatever as items in three different categories.

Quote
Something along those lines would probably work, although I'm curious as to your thoughts based on the above information that I just shared.  My thoughts are that it's going to be awkward if the burlusts are creating soppy poetry or if their broadcasts sound like something that are overly newsy or something.  So having some thematic sub-groupings of things by tone would likely be good.  Not assigned to specific races, but saying "these are sonnets" and "these are epic battle poems" might be good to make two lists.  NOT both being 1500 lines long by any stretch, but some division of it.

So I don't see a major problem with the generation, the addition of racial characteristic lists would make things relatively straightforward. Fleshing out the races or letting the forum have access to some of the more fleshed out information about the races would also be nice. For example, I really don't have any idea how the Spire feel about Sit-Coms or Jellyfish.

Yep, I'll get you to that in a sec.

Quote
Then we'd need some proper nouns and/or adjectives as appropriate for the lists in question, with different rules per kind of list, as you noted.  Since this could vary by race, it's something that we'd want different proper nouns by race in some cases, or different adjectives.

For instance, if there was a general broadcast named The {0} Show, then we might have a "hostile nouns" list that the burlusts plug into that sort of thing, which would include words like "Murder" and "Knife" and "Laser" and so forth.  We might have an "underwater nouns" list that the yali plug into that same thing, with words like "Seaweed" and "Coral" and "Eel" and so forth.

And then there might be other groups of broadcasts that look for proper nouns instead.

Yep. That should be straight forward. There are two nice part about arranging things based on race characteristics instead of defining the characteristics of the words. First, it allows words to be multifaceted. Lasers are both weapons and elegant photon based artistic tools (as opposed to shotguns). Races that find aesthetics and/or war appealing would both like lasers. Secondly, it allows gradients in racial characteristics. So the Skylaxians might be 80% interesting in science, compared to the Evuks who are 100% interested in science.

Yep, I see you're already on the same track as me. :)
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Offline x4000

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Could probabilities be attached to the frames, so that more distinctive frames turn up less often than more generic ones?
There could be any number of 'The Daily {0}'s or '{0} gun's without any problem, but too many 'Romancing the {0}'s and 'An Enquiry Concerning {0}'s would seem weird, possibly immersion breaking.

Sure, absolutely.  That could be done in a couple of ways.  One, we could have separate files for different levels of probability.  The other is that we could have different numbers of "grab bag tickets" noted for each item.  How that would work is this:

1000|The Daily {0}
1000|{0} gun
40|Romancing the {0}
200|An Enquiry Concerning {0}

Let's pretend that those are all in one list.  Now imagine a raffle.  Pretend that each of those items gets one raffle ticket for the item to the left of the pipe.  They all go into one "grab bag," and then a random ticket is pulled out.  Given a different number of items, the probabilities would shift drastically of course.  But in this particular example, you'd have 2240 tickets in total, so the probabilities would be 44%, 44%, 1.7%, and 8.9%, respectively.

Doing something like that is extremely common in our code, and it would not be hard to put that into the flat files with a pipe delimiter like that.

And for the inclusion of racial names, could we get a list of names from TLF to add to the spreadsheet?
If there will be names and the different races have different interests, then the spread of authorship throughout the races should reflect that - so if Skylaxians only have 80% interest in science compared to the Evucks 100%, then presumably there would be more scientific things written by Evucks than by Skylaxians.

I quite like the idea of dissident Burlust striking out against their tyrannical warlords by writing horrendously sweet pastoral poetry.

Haha.  I'll get the list of things races are interested in uploaded shortly, after I finish the next couple of replies in this thread.  In terms of the names from TLF, those were all procedurally generated, and only for the 8 races there.  I'd like to kind of start fresh in some respects here, as the cultures are different enough on this planet that I think that's warranted.

edit:

The Last Federation Racial Name system can be obtained using in game testing and referencing some text files. I think this list is pretty accurate.

Acution - [two characters]-[two digit number]  (all upper case)
Burlust - [3 letter syllable (2 consonant, 1 vowel) taken from BurlustNameParts.txt][another syllable from same list] (title case)
Peltian - [2 letter syllable (1 vowel, 1 consonant) taken from PeltianNameParts.txt][another syllable from same list] (all lower case)
Evuck - [2 letter syllable (1 vowel, 1 consonant) taken from EvuckFirstNameParts.txt] [4 letter syllable (2 vowel, 2 consonant, occasionally 1 vowel 3 consonant) taken from EvuckSecondNameParts.txt][another syllable from SecondNameParts] (first name lower case, second name, title case)
Skylaxian - [5 letter syllable from SkylianNameParts (2/3 vowels, 3/2 consonants] [Roman Numerals](title case)
Andorian - [letter][number][letter][number](all upper case)
Outpost Names contains lots of names for use as outpost names
Boarines - Specimen [4 digit number]
Thoraxines - Thoraxine Queens don't name themselves

Whoops, you already beat me to it.  Anyhow, yes, that's the system from the looks of it.
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Offline x4000

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Okay, this took longer than I expected, but here's an online doc with the relevant information: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y-vvJ_7hLMjruazV3IJry2zVPfVwSC1Nx2CZpBMOhvQ/edit?usp=sharing

I wound up doing some slight rebalancing of some of the AIs once I saw things in action.

Notes:
1. The early columns in there about BuyKnow, ImportMil, etc, are all leader-specific things that determine some of their behaviors in terms of what they will buy from you, broadly speaking.  It lets some leaders absolutely avoid buying or sharing things even though their race normally would.

2. makeBroad, makeConsum, etc, are all the really interesting columns in terms of determining just how much races like various things, and how quickly (kind of) they will make them.  These numbers are misleading, because they are just a sum of the values off all the building types, and the races will have many multiples of many of the types, so the actual production values could vary enormously game to game based on what the AI is up to (including what the specific leader's goals are).  But in terms of a general "how interested is this race in this" quotient, these are the general numbers that are used right now.

3. Anything that is blank in the makeBroad, makeConsum, etc columns means that race never makes that sort of thing when in the hands of the AI.  You will never ever see Broadcasts from the Acutians, at least not with this data configuration (a simple configuration change would alter that, of course).

4. BroadcastTypes, ConsumerProductTypes, etc, are all thematic fields that I just added today, and aren't in the game in any way.  These explain the reasoning and theming behind what each race is using that type of thing for.  In other words, the Krolin put out a lot of "fiction," but it's all meant to be propaganda, haha.

5. All of the pink/purple text items in BroadcastTypes, ConsumerProductTypes, etc, are player-only definitions.  In other words, despite the fact that an AI-controlled Boarine faction will never produce broadcasts, and player-controlled faction can produce anything, so there needed to be some sort of definition of the sorts of thematic things that the Boarines would produce for the players.  These pink/purple text cells are only for the 8 playable races of course, since it's irrelevant for the rest.


Probably the next to-do for some enterprising soul is to break down a list of the sub-types of market items that we want to have.  For instance, for poetry we know from the list we need:
- Epic tales of heroism and death.
- Short unpleasant rhymes about disease and death.
- Overly-sentimental works.
- Sad songs.
- Romantic sonnets.

And I think that's all the sub-categories for poetry, unless someone thinks of some other categories that might thematically fit.  A couple of the races pull from multiple of those categories, like the Fenyn getting both sad songs and romantic sonnets, but that's not a data definition thing, that's just a code thing.  No biggie.

But for things like the MilitaryProductTypes, that is a bit less defined.  There are some obvious ones that the spreadsheet notes:
- Weapons.
- Body mods.

But then the others just list "anything and everything."  So that would include those two categories, but what other sub-categories can people think up to add?


Anyway, I think that this gets us on the road to actually being able to do something with this! :D

Thanks again for all your help, folks.
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Offline Draco18s

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Just to have fun with this point

Yep, understood.  Here's the thing, though -- are you American?  I think if you are (I am), it may skew your view somewhat.  We have a ton of TV shows, for instance, that we export to all the countries in the world.  But how many TV shows from, say, Kenya do we watch?  If Kenya had a show called Broken Bad that everyone just loved, it's entirely reasonable that's their only Broadcast export.  It's not saying that's the only TV show in Kenya by any stretch.  But the other countries all have their own culture and so forth, and this is the only TV show that actually rises to a level of notability and hops the divide.

We have an entire Oscar category for foreign films.  A whole category for films "not made in the US, which is most of them, also they don't qualify for the other categories (most of the time)."

As for non-US TV that USians watch:
A handful of shows from Canada (Continuum)
A handful of shows from the UK (Top Gear, Doctor Who)
A fair bit of shows from Mexico and a few other countries (for the Spanish language community)
All the anime we can import from Japan.  Even the crappy stuff.  We literally can't get enough of the stuff for the demand.
And oh yeah, at least one show from Qatar (Al Jazeera).  Bet you forgot that.

So yeah, we actually do import a fair amount of non-US TV material.  You may not have heard of most of it, but that doesn't mean its not there.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2015, 10:52:04 am by Draco18s »

Offline x4000

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Just to have fun with this point

Yep, understood.  Here's the thing, though -- are you American?  I think if you are (I am), it may skew your view somewhat.  We have a ton of TV shows, for instance, that we export to all the countries in the world.  But how many TV shows from, say, Kenya do we watch?  If Kenya had a show called Broken Bad that everyone just loved, it's entirely reasonable that's their only Broadcast export.  It's not saying that's the only TV show in Kenya by any stretch.  But the other countries all have their own culture and so forth, and this is the only TV show that actually rises to a level of notability and hops the divide.

We have an entire Oscar category for foreign films.  A whole category for films "not made in the US, which is most of them, also they don't qualify for the other categories (most of the time)."

As for non-US TV that USians watch:
A handful of shows from Canada (Continuum)
A handful of shows from the UK (Top Gear, Doctor Who)
A fair bit of shows from Mexico and a few other countries (for the Spanish language community)
All the anime we can import from Japan.  Even the crappy stuff.  We literally can't get enough of the stuff for the demand.
And oh yeah, at least one show from Qatar (Al Jazeera).  Bet you forgot that.

So yeah, we actually do import a fair amount of non-US TV material.  You may not have heard of most of it, but that doesn't mean its not there.

I think we're actually saying much the same thing.  The fact that there is a foreign films category for Oscars is pretty much making the point.  You're also only listing a couple of really major countries out of the hundreds there are in the world.  And even out of those countries, there's only a handful of shows or movies that make it over every year (and in some cases, not even every year, mainstream-wise -- India, for instance).

Really you're making my point: the broadcast exports from Qatar can be summed up by Al Jazeera when it comes to the US (I didn't forget them at all, but I also didn't know which country they came from precisely, so there is that -- I would have guessed Egypt).  So it's not like we need to have some sort of representation of the 20 children's shows from Qatar that we import and watch here, which would be overwhelming.

My point is that only a tiny fraction of the broadcast output of a given country is exported to any other given country, with the general exception of the US.
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