Conceptually, sure. But I haven't started writing it, and it's too early in the development of the game itself for this sort of work to make sense in our development timeline...
If you are happy to answer this, it'd be nice, but no pressure. I was specifically wondering about the time period per turn. I'm in the middle of an interesting colony that seems like good fodder for fan fiction, I was hoping to frame it around a periodic update.
My understanding of play-by-email was that it was intended to make succession-type games possible, i.e. a single colony can be passed between successive players, like having the Administrator rotate in and out. As such, the period would be an arbitrary amount of days agreed upon at the outset. If I'm reading your post correctly, you seem to be wondering about competitive play-by-post, a la chess?
Hey. I guess I was assuming there would be some sort of automatic save and email/post feature for ease of use that would necessarily provide a default time period, like how you can normally assume a df community fortress would have turns of a year. With all due respect to dwarf fortress, one of the many ui issues it has is that the location of the saves and other other stuff relevant to passing the fort on are completely opaque. Given the nature of the community it has, that isn't much of an issue, but in something relatively more mainstream like ce, I would of thought something like that would be a requirement for some significant percentage of the audience who aren't the mad we like playing buggy early builds and getting kicks writing bug reports crowd, to actually be able to cope with the complexity of save sharing. BTW, how is the wiki doing? I was considering contributing updates for pages based on out of date revisions.
Hey, the wiki can always use a few more eyeballs - I think we've got the bulk of static goods like commodities, modules, and so on, entered in at least a basic form. A lot of the additions to the game lately have been in the areas of scripting, behaviours, and events, and those are seeing a lot of flux, so it's been slow going in those areas. If you see something out of date, feel free to fix it up.
Well, I suppose we could set up an improv type of game here in the forums? The reply thing lets us upload our saves for crashes, so wouldn't it work for a succession game? We'd probably need to set some rules before we began, like how many days per turn, agreeing 'not' to intentionally kill everyone, policies on enemies and so forth. I'd be up for that if anyone else is. It'd be interesting to see how bad we can muck things up. Playing on that one save file till the game is a bug filled, crash prone mess that you couldn't even load anymore.
Well, I can confirm it's possible to simply load up someone else's save file and continue from there, since I just tried it out. Simply copy your last save file to a forum thread. Fellow players can download the save file and go. The one issue is that this method won't work once save files exceed 8 megs, but that won't be until the colony reaches a population of 40 or so. At present, a new game will take about 1.5 hours to reach 10 in-game days. I'd suggest one player's 'turn' should be counted as an in-game week, 7 in-game days, and should take about one real-life hour. It might be an interesting exercise, just to help determine what sort of quality-of-life features feel important for correspondence 'succession'-type play. However, I have a suspicion that the next stable branch release is around the corner, to judge from previous updates, so it might be advisable to wait for that to go live. Once that happens, I'll be happy to give it a try. We can start up a forum thread and post up 'weekly' reports.
I'm up for that. Whoever sees the stable build drop first should get the initial thread up with the rest of us on in the player list it and start working out numbers / ground rules. I suggest requiring players to use the stable branch to try to avoiding save game imcompatiblity/bugs and playing it relatively fast and lose until there's a roughly agreed format. For my vote (for example), I'd leave faction policies wide open because different successive takes will make for a better read, although cults might be difficult to work with seeing as I always frontier justice everyone involved as soon as they develop. (is there any interest/advantage to cults? Cause they only ever seem to interfere with farms, which just feels annoying) We should definitely take a vote on the starting supplies and biome. I don't think there are any plans to introduce further biomes with the next stable build, but being the first(correct?) community colony and the first outing to no farming ice world be interesting.
Interested! I haven't played multiplayer anything in ages, but succession games with this community sounds great. I'm kind of the opposite, I actively encourage cults to the point where I'm disappointed if I can't get one to form early enough. Advantages to cults: They're happier They're entertaining (watching them go mad and recruit others is hilarious) They build lovely shrines They have brilliant names Disadvantages: None Seriously, I've had some pretty hefty cults recently and there's never been a hint of a murder spree or transformation. I'm not sure that works yet. Anyway, all these different gameplay styles will make for some great stories.
(That said, you might want to wait until the weekend just in case anything shakes out of the Revision 41 release that needs to be hotfixed. Just thinking.)
