Newsgroups: comp.ai.games
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!torn!nott!cunews!freenet.carleton.ca!FreeNet.Carleton.CA!bt422
From: bt422@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Neame)
Subject: Re: Town Simulation
Message-ID: <DFwGtw.2wI@freenet.carleton.ca>
Sender: bt422@freenet2.carleton.ca (Michael Neame)
Reply-To: bt422@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Neame)
Organization: The National Capital FreeNet
References:  <44rvgm$q2p@rc1.vub.ac.be>
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 01:15:32 GMT
Lines: 44


The Neon Antichrist (anon@vub.ac.be) writes:
> I was wondering how one could simulate a small community (pop. 500), 
> in a limited, yet detailed way.  The goal is to build an interactive 
> real-time visual (3d) simulation (a game, if you like)  of a few city 
> blocks.  
> You can walk around in this city, talk to people, follow them, watch 
> them go to work/bed/lunch, kill them, steal stuff, do some breaking 
> and entering...  
> 
> One of the key things I guess is to limit the possible actions of the 
> user, as well as the possible reactions of every individual.   
> Community resources, like shops, pizza-joints, police, fire-dept,... 
> should all be simplified.  Basic resources cannot ever be exhausted or 
> else the system will die.  Example:  there is one grocer which is the 
> only food source, except the pizza-shop.  The pizza-shop buys its 
> ingredients at the shop.   If you kill the owner of the grocery, the 
> store closes and everybody dies of starvation.  
> 
> This is obviously not an easy project, I was wondering if anybody has 
> any experience with this kind of simulations and what your 
> thoughts/comments are on this subject.
> 
> 
> TNA.
> 
> 
I've never thought about it, but you could do some really neat stuff with
genetically determined "occupants" and find out what habits, etc are most
optimum for survival, program it so that "sims" that brush their teeth
will be more attractive to other sims, those that work hard in school are
more successful in finding jobs, some are smarter than others, etc. You'll
have virtual landlords, virtual men-on-the-street, virtual bartenders,
etc. It would be really neat to have a town like that running that you can
"enter" and wander around in. It would be complex, but you could start
with a "building" object, a "Person" object and a "job" object, and derive
things like a town hall, an talian immigrant, and a pizza delivery person
from those, then you can define some rules for how these classes interact.
The interesting part would be to let the objects define their own
interactions and watch how the society develops. 
    If you really are going to do this seriously, I'd be interested in
helping. It sounds interesting. Let me know!
-Mike N.

