The unknown in Eulora 2 is by design both vast and multi-layered: there’s the infinite landscape to map out for sure, there is one’s own character to figure out as to who they really are, what they might be best, better or not quite so good at and there is also, underlying it all at any point, the available depth of how the euloran world even works and what that might mean at any given time. In other words, playing calls out to and rewards active and intelligent curiosity, exploration, discovery and applied ingenuity – it’s a playground for the active mind first of all, with meaning and duration too, since everything that has been informs what is currently and this in turn sets out what will come next.

The above means as well that Eulora 2 provides currently an infinite New Frontier. And like any New Frontier through the ages, there is so little known of just about everything in there, so little yet made or achieved by eulorans and so much to do, so much still possible but not yet even identified as such. Before one can even start seeing possibilities where previously one saw only “nothing”, one needs to understand enough of a place – to gain as it were not mere information but knowledge built up piece by piece and tested out through experience.

But in a New Frontier with its lack of just about anything both known and fully usable, how does one even start to build knowledge of all things, an intangible about as hard to pin down fully as anything? Well, it starts with active involvement for sure, trying out things, learning from them, solving problems as they arise and making one’s own tools as they are needed. There certainly isn’t much to be gained in Eulora 2 for very little effort as there tends to be in most other games out there with their rather Old Frontiers style, where one just uses what is provided (in other words, what previous generations built one after the other). But there is at the same time way more scope and freedom to make one’s own path and put one’s own mark on things. Requiring a different mindset then, perhaps, but a complementary one: ingenuity and self-direction sharpened in scarcity is sure to make more and more interesting things at that in abundance, too.

The best thing about this is that there isn’t even much need to get stuck in one mode or another, as long as you are simply self-aware and agile enough to go with both: when you are after quick results, easily obtained and little valued in the longer run, go to an Old Frontier place; when you are after ingenuity, multiple possibilities and the sheer exhilaration of discovery, find yourself a New Frontier place – if you can, that is.

As for the more concrete current euloran New Frontier problems, possibilities and needed ingenuity, the recent automation for exploring the land brought in plenty of activity for sure but with very little to show for it in terms of knowledge gained since claims are but transient sticks in the mud and handwritten notes can hardly ever keep up with bot-powered activity. So I first added knowledge ¹ use and acquisition to the client and then that opened up a whole lot of further useful options, as any well-chosen addition does.

The first pick of these options being (as it happened before, back in Eulora 1) the mapping of resource locations – only improved of course, in just about any and every sense, from automated inclusion of any claims as seen to handy retrieval of nearest location for any known resource, to automated generic scripts capable of handling any new knowledge as it comes in, to compacting the raw data and thus keeping the knowledge records to a manageable size. And being me, of course, I’ll make this all available ² as standard part of the public client, too, since I’d much rather help people with what tools there are and let any competition happen in terms of how well each can put them to use – or even to what end!

Putting it to use then, for my own needs, directly in the real-world, of course, revealed quite a few places for different resources in Preposterously Prosperous Place – and it showed as well that it takes currently about 8 hours for my bot-powered character to fully map (quite neatly, too!) one square in that grid. The much more regular shapes formed on this map as contrasted to those old maps of Eulora 1 are really due to the current bot’s more powerful movement capabilities.

For the traditional 1000 words worth of an ending:

1. There is this very practical difference between knowledge and logs: the former is not directly available in the game as such but has to be extracted and is meant to be actively maintained and fully in-use at all times, while the latter is more of an ever-growing record of things as they are obtained from the game and collected in whatever format one chooses. And in an infinite world of infinite age, any log is sure to overflow, any adequately extracted and maintained knowledge is sure to increase in usefulness.[↩]
2. The automated knowledge acquisition, storage and use is directly integrated in the currently deployed client, there is no need for any further action to have it working. The various knowledge stores are written currently directly to disk in plain text format in the data dir of the client and so they can be seen or further used from there at any time, too. As for charts or plotting the data, this is much more a matter of personal preference so I didn’t hardcode anything for it as such – while I have my own sh/awk/gnuplot scripts that do what I currently want from them, plotting sector-wide maps with all known resources from a single script, others may well prefer other uses and I have no problem with that, nor do I see any need to force my own scripts on anyone/everyone else and thus potentially limit diversity and opportunities for people to come up with different types of data visualizations, surely! Possibly such scripts or similar can even be in time a more accessible way for others to contribute and provide their own service for a fee of any sort, whether it’s reputation, in-game money, resources or anything else, just one option out of many that could be. Anyways, otherwise and as usual, I still tend to help those I like, if and when they ask for help.[↩]

Category: Coding, Eulora

Comments feed: RSS 2.0