Posted September 02, 2017 by Commodore Shawn
Work is starting to pick up, as more and more underlying systems are finished. Units are in the world and being simulated, and save/load should be finished tonight. Next up is settlement founding and management.
The major goal of 2.0 is to restructure the simulation to be less granular. In 1.4 each individual person and item is directly simulated. This works fine at a smaller scale, but I feel like the right niche for Bronze Age is bigger. Less Dwarf Fortress, and more Civilization. To achieve that sort of scale, the lower levels of the simulation have to be cut away.
Part of that is changing the structure of the world. Instead of tracking roughly person sized blocks of the world, Bronze Age 2.0 will track the world in hexes, with each hex being roughly equivalent to a full screen in 1.4. The simulation will mostly operate at the hex level, with things inside the hex being mostly "faked." Units are a good example of this.
The gif above, shows a unit of settlers moving through the world. The unit is moving from hex to hex, following a calculated path. The individuals within the unit though, don't do any individual pathfinding. When the unit moves from one hex to another, it calculates a destination for each individual in the new hex, and the individuals simply slide from their current position to the new one. This is much less intensive than 1.4, where each individual would calculate their own path. That sliding is an example of "faking" the simulation.
Another example of "faking", is the fact that the individual people in the unit have no mechanical effect at all. They are purely decorative, serving to give an impression of a crowd of settler, and also as a health bar (as the unit takes damage, the individuals will "die"). When fighting is re-implemented the units will fight each other directly, with the individual people within each unit acting out the results.
These sort of changes will hopefully preserve the spirit of Bronze Age, while preparing the way for mighty empires in the future.