TO Tagging

Ok so I thought of something last night which I think would be extremely useful for the Tech editor. Tags. When the player finishes designing something in the TE he/she can assign a tag to it to tell the computer what it does. Now I haven't considered all the things this could be applied to, but it would be very useful for buildings. Say you design a school in the TE, instead of adding a function part labelled "classroom", you just go to a pull down menu somewhere on the GUI and designate the tag of the building as "school". You could even specify if it is a Science School, Arts School, Mathematics School, or just General School, each of which would give its own bonuses to science or production or culture and give pop. growth bonuses to different factions. The different tags are unlocked from appropriate technologies. So the "school" tag would be unlocked by education in the tech tree (I'm pretty sure that is there). City Hall tag, or civic building tag could be unlocked by Early Government. I will refine this concept further, but that is it for now. Ideas?

Already covered.

Oh, sorry. Can I have the link?

Good point. Let's just discuss it here.

The problem I see with this is that if you can just tag a building as a 'school', or whatever function you need, you could just make every building a plain cube and tag it to suite. This removes most of the requirements to create a specific building, making it far too easy to get what you want/need. By requiring that a school has a classroom, and the a classroom has desks, chairs, some sort of display board etc. (and requires a teacher to function), we ensure that each building is actually fit for purpose, and costs an appropriate amount to build.

Now, you might mean the alternative, whereby tagging some thing as a school forces the computer to add a classroom, and any other required TO's to the building, without the player having to go to the hassle of giving the building an interior. So long as there is some check which ensures that the building is physically large enough to house a classroom, I think this could be a useful timesaver for players who don't want to design all their own buildings inside and out.

Seregon wrote:

The problem I see with this is that if you can just tag a building as a 'school', or whatever function you need, you could just make every building a plain cube and tag it to suite. This removes most of the requirements to create a specific building, making it far too easy to get what you want/need. By requiring that a school has a classroom, and the a classroom has desks, chairs, some sort of display board etc. (and requires a teacher to function), we ensure that each building is actually fit for purpose, and costs an appropriate amount to build.

Now, you might mean the alternative, whereby tagging some thing as a school forces the computer to add a classroom, and any other required TO's to the building, without the player having to go to the hassle of giving the building an interior. So long as there is some check which ensures that the building is physically large enough to house a classroom, I think this could be a useful timesaver for players who don't want to design all their own buildings inside and out.

Tagging is obviously meant to help with the content library and help the computer know what purposes objects have when you create them. You have a great point. My solution to the box problem is just one of materials. We've had the discussion about how complex building would be before, and we've generally agreed that they're only as complex as you make them. You don't have to be able to go inside of them, and I really don't want programmer to get headaches about procedurally generating interiors, because I feel that that's a huge task to burden them with, simply because of all of the different body shapes of organisms, the complexity of decoration, etc.

Basically, if the player tags a building as "school" we need the game to know that certain school materials are needed. Based on the size of the building, we calculate how many of what supplies (TOs) are needed and add them to the cost of building the overall TO. If the computer sees that these required TOs are already a part of the building (meaning the player built interiors and furniture in already) the computer doesn't add these in. It just makes sure that any "building" TO contains the required quota of smaller TOs to make it work correctly. This means, at some point in the future (not now) we need to create a comprehensive list of building TO tags and furnishing TO tags. We can do a similar thing with other large TOs, such as ships, but right now buildings are the main problem.

~sciocont wrote:

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Beat me to the punchline.

We also need to determine a way for the computer to calculate how many workers a buildings requires to operate. Say I design a textile manufactory in the TE, how will I know how many people in employs? How will the computer know? I was thinking that each piece of equipment have a set amount of people that it needs to operate. Like each classroom requires two, each loom requires two, and each mechanical loom requires 15. So if I fit my school with 5 classrooms, it employs 10 people. Each equipment also increases the effect of the building. So for example a building fitted with 10 looms will intake more wool and produce more cloth than a building fitted with just 3. A school fitted with 7 classrooms gives a larger bonus to science or production or culture than a school fitted with just 2.

To use classrooms as an example, each classroom gives a different bonus depending on the type of school it is. If it is a science school, the science output of the school is a base amount of science, let's say 0.2 science, multiplied by the number of classrooms. A science school with 10 classrooms gives a +2 bonus to science nationwide. Fine Arts Schools and Mathematics/Engineering Schools give their own bonuses multiplied by classroom count except the value is replaced by culture and production respectively.

Also, I was thinking that each TO should only have 1 tag, because then what stops the player from designating a building to be a city hall and school and police station and everything and only have to build one per city to manage all those needs?

That mostly works. Having a school produce x amount of science/arts/maths times the number of classrooms may be difficult though. A simpler system would be to have a scaler (the buildings output), multiplied by the output of each particular classroom.

So taking your example:
- the schools multiplier is 0.2
- a science classroom produces 1 science
- a fine arts classroom produces 1 arts
- a school with 5 science classrooms produces 1 science.

Your system could also work, but would require introducing unit manipulation (which we may do at some point anyway), such that:
- a classroom produces 1 education
- a science school produces 0.2 science/education
- an arts school produces 0.2 arts/education

I also don't agree with limiting each object to one tag. It's something which will severely restrict us at some point, and hopefully your example of a building which covers all needs would be far too expensive for any fledgeling city to build. It does bring us back to the point that the building should be big enough to house all its requisite TO's though, so that not only would the super-building be very expensive, it would also take up a similair amount of space as the buildings it's replacing.

Ahh I prefer your system far more. However, would the player have the ability to designate which types of classrooms to put in his school?

Right, the requisite TO's would put enough of an impracticality barrier to stop super-buildings. However, from what I understand of requisite TO's, will they be a preset list unlocked by technology or are they player designed? How will that work?

We'll ship requisite TOs with the game in the content library, but the player could create or download any TO with the appropriate tags and put that into the slot for the requisite.
Multi-tagging is a must.

So we'll have to draft a list of requisite TO's. But for now, yes I agree with multi-tagging. We should also start making a list of different tags a building can have and the requisite TO that goes with it. I'll start.

Tag: School
Requisite TO's: Classroom (Science, Fine Arts, or Mathematics)

I've got a ton of these on the Research Tree on the wiki. I'll try to assemble them here when i get time.

Thanks Alaska! If you need any help I'm right here.