An attempt at mapping using economics.

[Redrobes]

I have kinda got tied up it many other little projects. I wanted to do this application to see if it was possible. I think it might be possible but its very hard to debug when it doesn't do what you expect and is a bit of a time sink so its on the back burner. I hope people can read about this and take something away from it. I learned a few things doing the app - what works and what doesn't. To take it to the level I would have liked tho is going to take some significant amount of work and I don't have the time right now. I'm still glad to talk about what I did and what I would do differently or similar next time. If someone were to be paid as a game dev to make something then I think they would have the incentive to take the time hit to make this more of a reality. I think Talroths posts are very relevant and I think others have more experience of writing AI systems than I have.

I'm doing the MeDem at the mo which is the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Project and that's a bit of a time sink too but it generates some excellent material. There will be a point when we might like to populate that huge huge map with some semblance of creature activity and its too big a map to do by hand so I think in the micro scale a program like this could be used. So I might dig it out once more and soup it up a bit and let it loose on a bigger map.

The one thing I got from the results is that, tho its generating a sort of map from the workers moving about, I think its going to have to deal with a lot more complexity of transactions before the map is going to look anything like something we would recognize as being sensible human activity on a bit of terrain. There will be some critical mass of complexity tho when it starts to look good and then adding more should make it better but to get to the critical point might take a lot more work and time.

[tilt]

to bad, but understandable ... it was a fun project though