Oh how I love water! It is but the milk that seeps from the bosom of mother earth. An essential part to nearly all life and it’s quite refreshing. I should note that the whole business of bottling water and water privatization are the two craziest ideas ever and the fact that they actually occur on this planet is beyond me. I can think of better ways to make money than forcing people who don’t have money to buy water that they were already getting for free. They need this water because 1) it’s free and they don’t have money to buy Evian and Fuji and; 2) you need water to live. I’m pretty sure water privatization is just a big cover up for controlled genocide.

Anyway, water is a completely, undeniably, most certainly complex mofo that has all ten of its hands buried deeply in most natural cycles. While I’m sure I have — and will continue to — overlooked many facets of trees and plants, water is most certainly something I completely under-appreciated until recently. And then I realised that if I want my super environmental system to be really kickin, I’ll need to do my homework. I’m just finishing up with a course all about water. Well, it’s a resource conservation and management course, but what it gets down to is: water be everywhere. There is a type of planning known as “watershed planning” that deals with planning the built environment so that it has minimal impact on the movement of water and everything related to it. It’s really, really complicated and much is still to be researched.

All this is to say that there is more than meets the eye with water. Water that falls from the sky will produce runoff, which is just water running down slopes along the soil surface to streams and rivers, some water is absorbed directly into the soil and then works its way down to join the rest of the ground water which flows very slowly and then sometimes feeds into rivers without us really noticing. Then you have to consider the water collected right on the leaves of trees and plants. Some of this is absorbed, then some is also evaporated (this is called evapotraspiration).

Even worse is how water movement changes depending on the slope of the land, the soil composition, vegetative cover, and so forth. Some soils hold more water than others, some allow water to pass though more easily, et cetera. I can’t simply ignore soils and whatnot since, as previously mentioned, certain trees and plants will only grow in certain soil types that also correlate with the amount of water that specific tree or plant needs.

This whole water business is really baking my noodle and is going to require much more thought on my behalf.

I love trees and want them in more games. I don’t mean just moderately decent looking trees like seen in Oblivion, but trees that resemble exact species. Even more, trees should grow! You know how trees have seeds, and when they fall and get blown around and end up in the right soil with the right amount of water and sunlight, and don’t have to compete with invasive species they grow? I know this is totally possible and I want it. Yeah, I’m sure it will take loads of resources to accomplish, but that’s really not my concern.

Because this is a game and I want it to be richly detailed and not too dispersed, the land area will be pretty small. Because of this, there aren’t going to be extreme shifts in geography and whatnot. Instead, it’s going to closely mimic the land types of Ontario, Canada. That’s where I’m from, what I’m most familiar with, and I like it. If you don’t know what Ontario is like, Google it. Basically, the lands will consist of the three types of forests that are present in Ontario: deciduous forests, mixed forests, and boreal forests. I have a book that I purchased a while ago titled Trees in Canada, which thoroughly discusses all the trees in Canada, both native and non-native. I’ve made a list of all the potential trees I’ll include. To cut down, I decided not to include any non-native since their evil. Except for the ginkgo biloba, since it’s pretty much considered a living fossil and is unlike most any other tree. And it I think it was actually native here at one point in time, so it’s all good. I’m going to post my list up later when I have further auditions and make some cuts. I would love to include all the trees, but that’s just way too much work when I desire to have the growing pattern of each tree copied.

Plants are a completely different topic, one that I’m going to have to delve into a little later. Admittedly, I don’t have as much interest in plants as I do trees, but they’re just as important and the work involving them will probably be more extensive. Both plants and trees will both have to meet certain growing conditions. Even if a space meets the soil, sunlight, water, and temperature conditions for a tree or plant to grow, other plants and trees in the area play a large role in whether that seed will grow and succeed. Grasses may be rather short, but several species will grow in pretty much any conditions and will completely destroy a sapling. Forests have to go through different states. Without getting too into it, you basically start with an empty field with some sort of grasses and what people consider weeds. From here, if the seeds make it to the area, certain species of shrubs and bushes will grow. These then compete with these grasses and start to take over the site, which then makes it possible for certain species of trees to come in and grow. Once these trees are established, other types of trees come in grow. Eventually, a matured forest will be established, where not a whole lot of new species will grow. When a matured tree dies and falls, it opens up a space in the forest canopy where sunlight and rain can come down to nourish a young sapling. This will usually be a sapling of the same species, but it could be a different species altogether that will actually manage to survive. Eventually, the forest will be a more diverse matured forest, where instead of having two or three main species of mature tress, there will be many more.

Every tree and plant will be encoded with values that determine whether it can grow in an area. Some species can grow a lot easier in a wider selection of areas, and others not so easily and in not so many areas. Based on the weather system I’ve got going on below, these trees and plants should be pretty happy.

Basically, it’s a genius idea and is almost flawless. Instead of developing some crazy weather system that would act realistically that wouldn’t actually be realistic until we understood fully real world weather, I’m going to do something that’s easier, better, and yeah. What I’m about to propose will require that anyone who plays this game has an Internet connection, but it’ll be worth it. Since most larger cities have weather stations that have an assortment of gizmos. These gizmos tell us what weather is doing and send the data/information to the Internet among other places. Satellites could work too. The game would take the information from each available city and create a plot of sorts for the game.

I’ll run through an example. We’ll first take the weather information from Toronto. Toronto in the real world will relate to a specific point in the game world, whether there happens to be a city there or just random land. Then we take the next city, say Niagara Falls, which is x kilometres away from Toronto. The point in the game world that represents where Niagara Falls will be the same amount of distance and direction away from the representative point for Toronto. Then take the information from all other available cities and transfer it to their representative points. This will be done in pretty much real-time. So when I’m playing this game in Waterloo and I’m in the same location as where Waterloo would be in the game world, I should be able to look outside and see the same weather that’s in the game and vice versa.

Now, you’re probably asking what would happen for areas in the game where weather data in the real world is not collected. Make way for the method of spatial interpolation. What this means to you simpletons is it allows the game to estimate the values of properties at unsampled sites based on the values of the sampled sites. By comparing the values between the sampled values, the game will be able to create a map of weather for those unsampled areas. The closer an unsampled area is to a sampled one, the more closely it will resemble its weather. If we have two sampled sites and want to find what weather will likely occur at a place between those values, it will depend on where exactly that unsampled site is between the two sampled sites. If the unsampled site is one kilometre from site a and ten kilometres from site b, site a will have a much greater affect on what weather will occur at the unsampled site. As well, this weather map will be a gradient. Not necessarily a smooth gradient, but it won’t be extremely rough either.

Now, this system isn’t perfect, but it’s not my fault. The reason being real world humans, so, I guess it could be partially my fault. You see, we all pollute and contribute to global warming. If the game took place in present day, or even the future, this could be understandable, but I’m not sure what era in time it will take place. It may end up in the past with swords and chainmail since I hate guns. Because of this, the people in the game world wouldn’t be doing anything to cause extreme amounts of pollution to change the weather and climate, but the weather would still be changing in the game because it relies on the weather in our real world. This is probably something that just bothers me and won’t really be noticeable. I just thought I should point it out.

One of the most important things to me, aside from the core game play mechanics, is the social and environmental aspects. I want things running in the background, no matter their level of awareness to the player. The reason for this is immersion. Things should never be forced — they should only be there to occur on their own. This is why this game needs to have some sort of governmental system. It needs to be fully functioning, even if it is primitive in nature. It’s something that can be modified and built upon over time. It isn’t meant to support a utopian society since there is no such thing. The governmental system will be naturally flawed, something unavoidable, but it should still be able to function at the basic levels. It will likely resemble much of the governments of past and present nations in the real world, and for the sake of efficiency, there will only be one governmental system within the game, not multiple.

This game will feature a socialist type government, at least for the time being. This isn’t my depiction of how the real world should be, although socialism is pretty cool, it has much to do with how the player experiences the world. Things such as health care, city infrastructure, community dynamics, and so forth. I feel socialism would allow for these such things to work best in a game world.

I’ll need to figure out how education is going to work, how health care will work, trade networks, employment, agriculture, economics, and everything else imaginable. Tackling politics will help tie most of these things together so that they function reasonably well together. As I go through each sector, it will be a rather messy process, but as I develop each one, it will help improve the others. They will all evolve from each other. It’s gonna be great.

For now, let’s call it Socialism X.