Galactic Milieu
Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2022 1:24 am
The Galactic Milieu is an online multiplayer metagame which uses FreeCiv for planet-scale representation of civilised worlds.
Because those worlds are intended as "settings" for smaller-scale activities, typically using CoffeeMUD and/or Crossfire RPG currently, the target planet-Earth time per FreeCiv turn is about one Earth month. This is intended to match the CoffeeMUD timescale where MUD time runs about 12 times as fast as planet-Earth time.
Part of the motivation for this comes from decades-ago pencil-and-paper "Dungeons and Dragons" style gaming in which it emerged that most players of D&D-style "adventurers" were not interested in geopolitics beyond whatever quests or adventures on their scale some supposed or imagined or arbritrarily-invented geopolitics made available to them. The idea of having a larger-scale game as a backdrop or setting, if only as a gamemaster-aid to help the gamemaster manage the geopolitical scale, came up way back then.
A lot of the ideas behind the Milieu come from the Digitalis D'ydii Cluster that I developed for the Apple IIe back when that was the hot new PC.
The D'ydii Cluster used ideas from Traveller to populate a cube of space 1.0E11 parsecs on a side (large enough that the galaxies on the edges would be receding from the centre at lightspeed or more if receding of galaxies was implemented) with billions of galaxies of Traveller-style starsystems.
The problem with Traveller though was it had no evolution of the planets. No population growth, government type changes, techlevel development and so on.
Thus once we evolved from dialup "BBS" systems to the newfangled "internet" I started work on a Civlisation-like game, using the Athena widget set; then a year or few along the line the first version of FreeCiv appeared, I realised it had already developed far beyond my Athena-based attempt, so went with FreeCiv. The fact that FreeCiv can let you deterministically evolve a world through time seemed a particularly nice match with the D'ydii Cluster's use of pseaudorandom numbers based on spacial co-ordinates, theoretically making it possible to generate FreeCiv worlds instead of Traveller worlds and continue to evolve them through time until such time as some in game event triggered a need to record them in a database instead of continuing to rely upon the pseodorandom generator.
Over a decade ago now we began playtesting a few initial worlds using a Galactic Ruleset that is sort of a merge of Traveller numbers of parsecs hopped with Star Trek's "Warp numbers", so that a Warp 1 ship hops up to 1 parsec, a Warp 2 ship hops up to 2 parsecs and so on, providing a scale not so out of line with that used in Traveller.
Another part of the Milieu concept is to try to integrate scales toward possibly/maybe avoiding ecenomic strangenesses seen when comparing different/unconnected online games, wherein players entertainment budgets lead to things like a level 70 Ranger on a fantasy planet costing the same amount in dollars as a whole Deathstar in a game where one flies a Deathstar around instead of just running around as on individual Ranger or whatever. I was interested in things like if you buy a magic sword on E-Bay for X number of dollars, and building a Death-star out of melted-down magic swords would take millions of such swords, how much would a Deathstar go for?
Unfortunately there will probably be a tendency once players scale up for at least some of the larger-scale players to trash the prices of the smaller scales by "flooding the markets", "dumping" massive amounts of "stuff", driving prices down.
To some extent that is supposed to be how economics works, but games complicate economics in a way that is possibly not unlike having lots of important economic actors being devotees of godlike entities that do not actually exist in the game but to whom vast amounts of stuff can be "sacrificed".
In the Milieu we therefore attribute the currency known as BiTCoin to the "Hacker" civilisation, assumed to be a civilisation whose technology is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magick. This provides an in-game backstory as to why BiTCoin is esteemed far more than the currencies of civilisations whose technologies remain within the range shown in the Galactic Ruleset.
The "Hackers" are imagined to live in worlds possibly rather like those portrayed by the default, no-permadeath releases of Crossfire RPG: even death has been conquered, if you die you simply wake up back at your savebed, and so on.
The Crossfire RPG server we use in the Milieu though does have permadeath enabled, despite the fact that who-ever once upon a time added permadeath into the code never really tidied up all the lose ends. (For example if you die someone else could claim your character-name before you reclaim it, thus taking over your guild memberships, bank accounts, mailboxes and so on.)
The Milieu is also an alternate reality game; for example it is assumed that Satoshi brought Bitcoin to the planet known as Earth, that GNU is part of a plot to bring Earth into the Galactic Milieu, and so on and so on. The CE and BCE dates used by FreeCiv for the timelines of the planets are assumed to align with Earth's history.
The recent popularity of the ideas of "play to earn" and "the metaverse" seem basically like the mainstream finally catching up with the Milieu's ideas and getting set to run with them. The Milieu has not actively sought "venture capital" and maybe that will turn out to be unfortunate as maybe now the ideas will become mainstream without the Milieu even being noticed. But the players are theoretically well placed to seek venture capital if they wish to, since for over a decade now they have been "playing to earn" building Corps and such that in principle allow not just venture capitalist buy-ins but also crowd-funding. It is maybe mostly a matter of how much recruiting players choose to do. The clan/guild/etc types provided by CoffeeMUD allow a wide range of options for group decision-making, and some of the clans/guild/etc have accumulated quite a pile of assets over the years.
I mainly posted this here because long long ago I had quite a few posts on whatever the old forum was, but I see that on this forum they do not exist. So I thought it time to broach the subject once more.
-MarkM-
Because those worlds are intended as "settings" for smaller-scale activities, typically using CoffeeMUD and/or Crossfire RPG currently, the target planet-Earth time per FreeCiv turn is about one Earth month. This is intended to match the CoffeeMUD timescale where MUD time runs about 12 times as fast as planet-Earth time.
Part of the motivation for this comes from decades-ago pencil-and-paper "Dungeons and Dragons" style gaming in which it emerged that most players of D&D-style "adventurers" were not interested in geopolitics beyond whatever quests or adventures on their scale some supposed or imagined or arbritrarily-invented geopolitics made available to them. The idea of having a larger-scale game as a backdrop or setting, if only as a gamemaster-aid to help the gamemaster manage the geopolitical scale, came up way back then.
A lot of the ideas behind the Milieu come from the Digitalis D'ydii Cluster that I developed for the Apple IIe back when that was the hot new PC.
The D'ydii Cluster used ideas from Traveller to populate a cube of space 1.0E11 parsecs on a side (large enough that the galaxies on the edges would be receding from the centre at lightspeed or more if receding of galaxies was implemented) with billions of galaxies of Traveller-style starsystems.
The problem with Traveller though was it had no evolution of the planets. No population growth, government type changes, techlevel development and so on.
Thus once we evolved from dialup "BBS" systems to the newfangled "internet" I started work on a Civlisation-like game, using the Athena widget set; then a year or few along the line the first version of FreeCiv appeared, I realised it had already developed far beyond my Athena-based attempt, so went with FreeCiv. The fact that FreeCiv can let you deterministically evolve a world through time seemed a particularly nice match with the D'ydii Cluster's use of pseaudorandom numbers based on spacial co-ordinates, theoretically making it possible to generate FreeCiv worlds instead of Traveller worlds and continue to evolve them through time until such time as some in game event triggered a need to record them in a database instead of continuing to rely upon the pseodorandom generator.
Over a decade ago now we began playtesting a few initial worlds using a Galactic Ruleset that is sort of a merge of Traveller numbers of parsecs hopped with Star Trek's "Warp numbers", so that a Warp 1 ship hops up to 1 parsec, a Warp 2 ship hops up to 2 parsecs and so on, providing a scale not so out of line with that used in Traveller.
Another part of the Milieu concept is to try to integrate scales toward possibly/maybe avoiding ecenomic strangenesses seen when comparing different/unconnected online games, wherein players entertainment budgets lead to things like a level 70 Ranger on a fantasy planet costing the same amount in dollars as a whole Deathstar in a game where one flies a Deathstar around instead of just running around as on individual Ranger or whatever. I was interested in things like if you buy a magic sword on E-Bay for X number of dollars, and building a Death-star out of melted-down magic swords would take millions of such swords, how much would a Deathstar go for?
Unfortunately there will probably be a tendency once players scale up for at least some of the larger-scale players to trash the prices of the smaller scales by "flooding the markets", "dumping" massive amounts of "stuff", driving prices down.
To some extent that is supposed to be how economics works, but games complicate economics in a way that is possibly not unlike having lots of important economic actors being devotees of godlike entities that do not actually exist in the game but to whom vast amounts of stuff can be "sacrificed".
In the Milieu we therefore attribute the currency known as BiTCoin to the "Hacker" civilisation, assumed to be a civilisation whose technology is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magick. This provides an in-game backstory as to why BiTCoin is esteemed far more than the currencies of civilisations whose technologies remain within the range shown in the Galactic Ruleset.
The "Hackers" are imagined to live in worlds possibly rather like those portrayed by the default, no-permadeath releases of Crossfire RPG: even death has been conquered, if you die you simply wake up back at your savebed, and so on.
The Crossfire RPG server we use in the Milieu though does have permadeath enabled, despite the fact that who-ever once upon a time added permadeath into the code never really tidied up all the lose ends. (For example if you die someone else could claim your character-name before you reclaim it, thus taking over your guild memberships, bank accounts, mailboxes and so on.)
The Milieu is also an alternate reality game; for example it is assumed that Satoshi brought Bitcoin to the planet known as Earth, that GNU is part of a plot to bring Earth into the Galactic Milieu, and so on and so on. The CE and BCE dates used by FreeCiv for the timelines of the planets are assumed to align with Earth's history.
The recent popularity of the ideas of "play to earn" and "the metaverse" seem basically like the mainstream finally catching up with the Milieu's ideas and getting set to run with them. The Milieu has not actively sought "venture capital" and maybe that will turn out to be unfortunate as maybe now the ideas will become mainstream without the Milieu even being noticed. But the players are theoretically well placed to seek venture capital if they wish to, since for over a decade now they have been "playing to earn" building Corps and such that in principle allow not just venture capitalist buy-ins but also crowd-funding. It is maybe mostly a matter of how much recruiting players choose to do. The clan/guild/etc types provided by CoffeeMUD allow a wide range of options for group decision-making, and some of the clans/guild/etc have accumulated quite a pile of assets over the years.
I mainly posted this here because long long ago I had quite a few posts on whatever the old forum was, but I see that on this forum they do not exist. So I thought it time to broach the subject once more.
-MarkM-