Hey everyone, I’ve been reading a lot of astrobiology books lately such as Rare Earth and The Privileged Planet and in the process have been inspired to design a game built upon the concept of controlling the destiny of a habitable planet in a Sim/RTS game. I already know that Spore plans on doing something similar. However, instead of only concentrating on the evolutionary development of a single species at a micromanagement level I thought it’d be interesting to direct the growth of an entire biosphere and its inhabitants on a macro level. Additionally, I’m thinking of a game that is more scientifically accurate than previous god-mode games. So far I’ve envisioned the game to be divided into two primary roles or phases of gameplay. At first I want the player to focus on the requirements for making their planet inhabitable and building up their biosphere, but as soon as an intelligent species arises on their planet I want gameplay to begin focusing on the civilization growth of the intelligent species(s) occupying the planet. I’m not quite sure how this transition can be made yet at this point, so I was wondering if the collective creative minds here might have some ideas. The other inherent problem with this transition is the passage of time. In the beginning of the game the player is going to be acting on geological timescales, such that a single second of gameplay might represent a hundred or a thousand years, whereas when the player takes control over their intelligent specie(s) the time scale is going to need to change drastically so that a second of gameplay might represent a month or a week instead. I think that if the first transition can be figured out that coming up with a solution for the timescale difference shouldn’t be too difficult. I'll try to provide some examples of player decisions in a future post. This is already long enough as it is and I don't want to deter readers.

I decided to provide examples of decisions players might have to make during the startup phase of the game.

There are some details I left out but this is the basic breakdown:

Setup Phase: Choosing your galactic neighborhood, star, and planets.

The first thing a player must do is choose what region of the galaxy they want to occupy. This will affect the types of stars available, metallicity (the number of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) of the stars, and occurrence of extinction level events.

STEP 1: CHOOSE YOUR GALACTIC LOCATION:

Inner Galaxy:

Pros: High metallicity and variety of stars meaning that the quantity and mass of terrestrial planets is likely to be very high. Any resident civilizations in the inner system will have an easier time traveling to other star systems when and if they develop space travel technology.
Cons: High frequency of extinction level events such as gamma rays bursts, rogue black holes, and nearby super nova. Additionally, the close proximity to so many stars makes astronomical observations more difficult due to light pollution and interference, thereby retarding scientific advancement in astronomy. Also, many of the terrestrial planets may in fact be too massive to support life such as enormous pure carbon diamond planets.
Difficulty Level: Hard

Middle Galaxy:

Pros: Average levels of star metallicity, which allows the formation of terrestrial planets and high mass elements to be common, but not as abundant as stars in the inner galaxy. Also the frequency of mass extinction events is significantly lower than stars of the inner galaxy. The middle galaxy is also best situated for scientific observation, research, and development for any residential civilizations.
Cons: As the middle galaxy is the most ideal location for habitable star systems in the galaxy there are very few cons except that habitable planets may be less interesting to players (very similar to Earth) than some of the more alien planets that are likely to occur in the inner and outer galaxy.
Difficulty Level: Easy

Outer Galaxy:

Pros: Lowest frequency of extinction level events and a greater probability of stable evenly luminous stars. Planets that arise in the outer galaxy are more likely to have a longer uninterrupted lifespan.
Cons: Lower level of metallicity among stars meaning that the occurrence of large terrestrial planets around stars is much less likely than the middle or inner galaxy. Finding other habitable star systems in the nearby galactic neighborhood will be much more difficult.
Difficulty Level: Medium

STEP 2: CHOOSE YOUR STAR:

Orange Star:

Pros: Longest lifespan of all star-types, lasting potentially hundreds of billions of years. Typically these stars have stable energy output throughout the duration of their lifetime. They are also one of the most abundant star types in the universe.
Cons: Because they are smaller and not as hot as other stars the habitable range in which liquid water can exist is much narrower, usually only allowing a single habitable planet to form. Planets forming within the habitable zone of a small orange star are also more likely to be tidally locked, meaning that the same side of the planet always faces the sun like the way the same side of the moon always faces the Earth. This means that life is likely to only occur along the terminator (the border between the light and dark side of the planet) or sun-facing side of the planet.
Difficulty Level: Medium

Yellow Star:

Pros: Sufficient lifespan that allows evolution to occur over several billion years on any habitable planet. Slightly higher level of energy output allowing for a broader habitable range where life-bearing planets are more likely to occur. The Sun would be considered a yellow star.
Cons: Although there are not very many disadvantages to this type of star they are rare and only represent less than 10% of the star population in the universe. They also increase substantially in size over their lifespan so any planet located close to the star near its birth may no longer be hospitable to life near the star’s death.
Difficulty: Easy

White Star:

Pros: Very large habitable zone where planets are likely to support life. In some cases it may be possible for there to be two or three habitable planets around a single white star.
Cons: Relatively short lifespan lasting only a few billion years meaning that any intelligent life would have to evolve quickly and obtain space travel technology to colonize another star system before their home star system is destroyed. Sun flares are likely to also be more lethal and common around this type of star.
Difficulty: Hard

Blue Star:

Pros: Largest possible habitable zone for planets that can support liquid water.
Cons: Shortest lifespan of all stars, lasting only a couple hundred million to a billion years. If your inhabitants don’t evolve extremely fast and discover how to travel to other star systems soon their civilization will end before it even has a chance to begin.
Difficulty: Insane

STEP 3: CHOOSE YOUR PLANET:

Small Terrestrial:

Pros: The smaller gravitational pull of this planet will make the occurrence of extinction events from comets and asteroids less common. The effects of gravitational erosion are going to impact the elevation of mountains and canyons less, allowing for a more diverse and interesting landscape. Creatures developing on this planet will likely have greater mobility due to less constraint on their physical structures from gravity and will also find space exploration to be easier from the offset as the escape velocity required isn’t as high.
Cons: Lower amount of natural resources, weaker electromagnetic field to protect the atmosphere/biosphere, thinner atmosphere, and less plate tectonic activity needed to circulate nutrients and provide continents that can rise out of the oceans. Also, most life forms are likely to have less strength and external protection than other life forms on larger terrestrial planets.
Difficulty: Hard

Medium Terrestrial:

Pros: Adequate supply of natural resources, plate tectonics, electromagnetic field, and atmosphere. Capable of supporting a diverse set of ecosystems with life forms that possess average properties of strength, protection, and agility. Earth would be considered a medium terrestrial planet.
Cons: Slightly higher chance of enduring extinction events from comets and asteroids due to the larger gravitational pull. Scientific exploration into space may be slightly more difficult since the escape velocity to leave the planet is significantly higher than a small terrestrial planet.
Difficulty: Easy

Large Terrestrial:

Pros: Abundant supply of natural resources, strong electromagnetic field, and thick atmosphere. Life forms are more likely to be extremely strong, durable, and capable of withstanding great pressure.
Cons: Have a high occurrence of extinction events from asteroids and comets due to larger mass, so maintaining a biosphere and/or civilization for long periods of time becomes more difficult. If plate tectonics aren’t strong enough land may have difficulty pushing to the surface out of the water to create continents. Therefore, it’s possible that most of the planet may be covered by a shallow ocean. The thicker atmosphere might make it more difficult for any civilization on the planet to make accurate astronomical observations. Certainly, developing technology to get into space will be much more difficult.
Difficulty: Medium

[Edited by - WorldPlanter on January 21, 2007 4:55:09 PM]

How about slowing the passage of time down (y1 = e^x -->y2 e^(x/2)) whenever an evolutionary jump occures? This effect would stick for a certain timespan so that several evolutionary jumps could accumulate (y = e^(x/(2^jumps)) this way the more interesting stuff happens the more time you take to look upon its consequences. If you assume that certain evolutionary jumps open certain options
for you to influence the world and if you treat inventions the same way you do with evolutionary jumps the game would automatically slow down drastically and give you new options you can use instead of the longterm ones from before.

Quote:

Original post by Wush How about slowing the passage of time down (y1 = e^x -->y2 e^(x/2)) whenever an evolutionary jump occures? This effect would stick for a certain timespan so that several evolutionary jumps could accumulate (y = e^(x/(2^jumps)) this way the more interesting stuff happens the more time you take to look upon its consequences. If you assume that certain evolutionary jumps open certain options for you to influence the world and if you treat inventions the same way you do with evolutionary jumps the game would automatically slow down drastically and give you new options you can use instead of the longterm ones from before.

Interesting approach. I was actually thinking of something similar, though I didn't put much thought into the mathematical relationship.

I think it's fair to say that each major evolutionary change should automatically affect the time-scale. I was also thinking that the player could manually adjust the passage of time, but there would be default settings that are ideal for each stage of development.

Is your evolution predetermined? What kind of options you would plan to have influence the life on your planet. Personally I first thought of sliders that influence the wellfare on classes of species that depend on this factors
(for algaes this would be something like unfiltered solar power, for birds wind speeds and air density etc) however this might be to artificial if you want something more realistic.

one thing you could try to do which i don't think has been tried before would be to simulate things down to a cellular level. molecular or even atomic would be nice but that would take too much coding time. this way, life could evolve the way it really would in a natural environment and we could probably see a species as intelligent or moreso than us arise under good conditions. it would also be fun to see strange and exotic animals arise that we've never seen before.

now that i think about it, molecular might be a better approach, but i was thinking, you could have it evolve on the atomic level until multi-cellular life evolved, then scale it up to the molecular level until complex organisms arise, then move to the cellular level.

you could stick to atomic the whole way.. or even sub-atomic, actually just doing it down to the string level would be the best if you really want to capture the true essence of things, but it would take extra coding time.. dozens of hours.. maybe several dozen extra hours..

Developing life is not that easy, there is a whole genre of artificial life games out there that still did not get behind a certain level of complexity,
beside you should not await those systems to be exactly modeled and function like real life, as real life is unbelievable complex even at microscopic level.

Well sientist and people are trying to find the abstract essence of life, the make neural network, let autonomous bots interact and try to look at the essence of structure by investigating cellular automata.(in a certain way neural network, bots and cellular automata ar just subcategories of the same species of systems)
However up till now no clear definition can be made of life and the structures that arise a are relatively simple selfreplicators(or preservers).
Well I also personally tried to find a cellular automata that has the magic
properties, however those thinks are emergent which means "really" unpredictable.
just for taste: http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Main_Page
Its a bot based gamein the forum should be some links to other games like
darwin pond, gene pool and whatever

Ignore this. This post went through wrong.

Quote:

Original post by sharpnova one thing you could try to do which i don't think has been tried before would be to simulate things down to a cellular level. molecular or even atomic would be nice but that would take too much coding time. this way, life could evolve the way it really would in a natural environment and we could probably see a species as intelligent or moreso than us arise under good conditions. it would also be fun to see strange and exotic animals arise that we've never seen before. now that i think about it, molecular might be a better approach, but i was thinking, you could have it evolve on the atomic level until multi-cellular life evolved, then scale it up to the molecular level until complex organisms arise, then move to the cellular level. you could stick to atomic the whole way.. or even sub-atomic, actually just doing it down to the string level would be the best if you really want to capture the true essence of things, but it would take extra coding time.. dozens of hours.. maybe several dozen extra hours..

I want the game to be more scientifically accurate and realistic than previous evolution/god-games but I don't think I want to break it down to the molecular or atomic level for the sake of simplicity and player usability. Wush's suggestion of sliders controlling basic parameters such as solar energy levels that penetrate the atmosphere, thereby affecting the prosperity of algae is more along the lines of what I was thinking. For example, during the creation phase of the planet players may have control over the relative composition of silicates, carbons, heavy elements, radioactive elements, and volatiles, but I wouldn't expect to break each of those categories down into elements or molecules such as FE, C, Si, Po, K, O, U, etc. I think this is unnecessarily detailed and players would become frustrated with the complexity and required knowledge of chemistry. I want the game to be educational but on an abstract and conceptual level.

Also, if I attempted to make the game too realistic players would get extremely annoyed, because life would seldom occur on any of their planets. The parameters for life are much narrower than most people think. Thus far, there are only three possible basic structures for life and only two can occur naturally. There is carbon based water dependent life, carbon based ammonia dependent life (not proven but hypothetically possible), and silicon based life, which can not occur naturally and would have to have been created by one of the first two life-forms.

The occurrence of carbon based water dependent life based on all scientific knowledge and theory is the most likely to occur throughout the universe. This is not due to a lack of imagination on the part of scientists. This is based on very reasonable and undisputable scientific fact dealing with chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Carbon based ammonia dependent life may be possible but extremely rare as any ammonia dependent biochemistry would take about 10 times longer to evolve on average as water dependent carbon life. This means that it would likely only occur around stars smaller than our Sun, which have a longer lifespan. However, many problems exist for the support of habitable planets around small stars. The habitable zone for ammonia biochemistry based life is also even smaller than the habitable zone for water biochemistry based life. If ammonia dependent life exist at all it is likely to occur only once for every 100 occurrences of water dependent life. This means that if there is other life outside Earth that it is 99% likely to be carbon based water dependent like us.

To carbon based ammonia dependent life Earth would seem like a very hot planet filled with acidic oceans. As an interesting side note, the aliens in Signs would have had to be ammonia dependent carbon life forms for water to be acidic to them. This means that ammonia biochemistry based life would have a difficult time trying to find other planets to settle since water is more abundant than ammonia throughout the universe. If a player is looking for a challenge in the game though, then they would probably like to see what they could do with an ammonia biochemistry setup.

People often believe that Earth orbits an average star in the galaxy but this is not true. Only about 10% of the stars in the universe are the same size or class as our Sun. Additionally, 90% of stars are part of a binary, triple, or quadruple star system, which makes stable orbits for terrestrial planets near impossible. Already this brings the number of Sun-like stars in the galaxy down to 1% the population. The Sun is also unique in the fact that it has a circular orbit around the center of the galaxy and not located in one of the dense spiral arms, which is hazardous to life for several reasons including nearby supernova, orbital perturbations, hot HII regions in molecular clouds etc. It is also not in the inner galaxy where dense star population would interfere gravitationally and super nova would occur very often in close proximity, and it is not too far to the outside of the galaxy where the levels of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium is extremely low.

There are several other factors but it would take far too long to go into right now.

Anyway, to overcome the brutal reality of how rare life is and extremely strict its requirements are I’m going to grant the player abilities, which I’m thinking of calling divine interventions. For example a player may be able to prevent a nearby star from going super nova and wiping out his inhabited planet. Or a player might be able to redirect an incoming asteroid that is going to collide with his planet. In some cases a player may actually want an asteroid or comet to hit their planet for several reason. Most of the water around stars is expected to exist further out such as with our solar system. It’s believed with fairly substantial evidence that most of the water on Earth did not actually occur here originally but was delivered by colliding comets early in Earth’s history. Additionally, sometimes it’s necessary to have a mass extinction on a planet to further the evolution of life. If dinosaurs weren’t wiped out mammals would have never had the opportunity to fill the niche of upright, large, carnivorous animals, except perhaps on a few isolated continents or islands. So natural disasters aren’t always necessarily going to be a bad thing, but certainly super novas or gamma ray burst are undesirable for any possible life type. There are several other divine intervention abilities the player would have control over as well, but no need to outline them all right now.

You might be interested in this 3d artificial life and evolution simulation: http://www.frams.alife.pl/