I am profoundly alone, or feel it


Unrelated to topic, but anyhow.

@p Vex has a billion interesting models. Or at least, umake does. Take for instance the commodities system. When modelling commodities, I thought "what basic categories shall there be?"

@p It turned out four: food, material, fuel, and minerals

@p This isn't some kind of divine list or anything, just seemed a reasonable enough set.

@p Immediately it strikes you that it would be totally inappropriate for some cavemen to traffic in deuterium 3 nitrate or some other exotic thing, so we go ahead and parameterize each commodity along cultural evolution as well.

@p Then, it comes time to place commodities. What I realized just now while puzzling about Dr. Mario on my bed, is there are really two other broad categories: cultural commodities (food and material) which are only trafficked by a certain culture, but can always be trafficked by them no matter where they live, and planetary ones (fuel and minerals). So a planet will have some number of fuel/mineral commodities on it, but only if there happens to be a culture of appropriately high evolution type can it be mined. On the other hand, anywhere there is a city of a given culture, you may be able to purchase their basic food stuff, or construction materials.

@p Voila!

@p The model isn't really what's so interesting, it's how the model is arrived at through this intuitive-organic design process.

2004-02-12


◀ Back