Centauri's Thoughts

This is a totally new concept, and one that can play into many aspects. A new skill, for RPG, and a new thing to do. This new concept can be used in many ways. Some might be collaborative efforts, or used as a stand-alone. Depending on what is un-covered, and how many things, might reveal something of significance.
As a stand alone, dig depth might be reset after a short time, for collaborative, it might NEVER reset.

There will definitely be a lot of thought on this one, as to how to use and implement it.

Some ideas for use: as one digs and finds things, and some of these tie together, a new clue is revealed, either for another dig site, or for some other purpose.

This opens up a whole new way of playing, since it seems so many people like puzzles of various sorts.

Because of the variability, one can partially solve many puzzles at once, but exploring and digging and revealing will add up in various ways.

Perhaps a player can suddenly solve a few different puzzles because of one major “find” that makes many parts of the puzzle fit together.

Again, this one will take some thought and planning.

History
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The cave puzzles have to do with finding specific objects, as keys, to find other rooms. This new concept can be used in far more creative ways.

This is one reason it will require a database for each user, to track various things found, even if they are out of sequence (which was not possible in the key-finding scenario).

Since it has now been a little over 6 years, its about time to review some overviews of things, perhaps to get a sense of scale of it all.

In the 10,000 to 20,000 view, the lands are defined by 2 main mountain ridges, one to the far north, that runs east-west, and that one almost touching another ridge to the far east, that runs nearly north-south.

South and west of these 2 great mountain ridges are the rest of FluxMain proper. All the lakes, rivers, and habitation areas are contained within this area. This includes (so far) ALL of the known points reachable on FluxMain.

The eastern ridge show some of the limits, because the main lake that feeds the Hydro power gen is held back there, and cannot be visited yet.

There are many scattered lands that have fingers of developments started, but the most detailed areas are centered around the SpacePort, mostly bounded by the rivers. This truly is 90-95% of the development of FluxWorld. Given that the inhabitants took a very long multi-generational trip to get here, its no surprise that they dont feel a need to venture into space all that much (although a few little jaunts within the area are ok).

The things the new inhabitants found and built on FluxWorld, were sufficient enough for the large majority of them, to be happy on the new planet, with only a few having that dream of living and working in space. Those few also knew of the past, that keeping all your eggs in one basket was not a good idea, as well as the profit obtained from mining the moons and nearby asteroids. So, although there are some things going on in space, the main community is on FluxMain.

In near space, there are satellites, the Drydock, some assorted stations, and farther out, a way to reach the moons, Indari and Menoa, and even farther out, some outposts and even the great L5 farming station.

If one ventures even farther, there are ways to reach a few other planets and moons, and even other solar systems and galaxies are possible, although, this is not the focus of where the majority of building is going on.

The community and lands continue to grow, as the inhabitants spread slowly, and build as they go. You just never know what you'll find, until you get there!

The last few weeks have seen much work and changes related to RPG, weapons, cash, stat building, etc. Although I could list it all in detail, I will just say that I fixed some old things that I wasnt aware was a problem, and made some significant enhancements, based on actually playing more in this area.

As a result, the creature kill areas are better, and the proper use of weapons and armor (clothing types) are also more important.

Training of skills in the various classrooms, definitely helps as far as RPG, but it also bleeds over into other things that might seem unrelated. Fixing things, for example, or language skills.

Along with all this, have come some minor fixes to the bank, and more scrutiny of the banking itself, including loans and interest bearing savings accounts.

Area building itself, though coming along, is a bit slower, due to the fleshing out of good descriptions, sounds, details, etc.

As always, I work on things, a section at a time, as I think about those sections. It usually involves the rooms, objects, properties, and function, as I add more completeness to a concept.

One new idea is mostly an internal toy for me, but could develop into something interesting and useful, i.e. electronic sims. This will be in the style of today’s embedded microprocessors, in which you can write programs for these devices to talk to specific pins on the object, and direct them to be inputs, outputs, or input-output. This can then be used to connect to some other objects that are “wired” to those pins. This can be anything from a simple LED display to visually see the 1s and 0s, to some device which can use a series of these outputs together as addressing.

This will involve a few generic devices, which will be the parents for a whole new class of objects, and hopefully some modules of sorts to do specific things.
Flux already supports many types of advanced communication between objects, which I use pretty extensively, especially in the power generation objects.

Development of such things, as always, is limited only my my time and inclination to work on it

I began work out the “outback” over two years ago, behind my main residence, after the initial patio, Japanese Garden, clearing and Helipad. I felt I needed a somewhat bigger outdoor space to play with for the seasonal animated rooms, outdoor rooms in general, and for some completeness to the beaches near the rivers. One such very special place is where the firepit is, on a beach area near the apex of two rivers.

This area covers some 40+ rooms, not including the hilltop (11 rooms).

Although quite an interesting area as it currently stands, it was always planned for the hilltop to be completed at some point.

Now that I am in Phase II, I am working on this special hilltop, which can currently be encircled, but not entered. Since all references to the directions which would lead onto the hilltop only give descriptions of facing a sheer rock face (as designed) I needed an interesting and tricky way into it.

Without spoiling the surprise of how to get to it, lets just say its interesting, and somewhat logical, given the lay of the land.

What will actually be on top, is yet to be determined, and some may never find find it, but I do challenge all to try!

Given the height of the plateau, over the surrounding landscape, the view will be tremendous in all directions.

This little sub-project will take a good amount of time and allow the creative juices to flow once again in FluxWorld.

Well, once again its time to talk about FluxWorld. Although its been a while, everything that was there before, is still in existence. Its not like it got wiped and we're starting over, its more like we're taking a breath, and pushing for phase II now. This will include things like detailing out areas that were initially created and never finished, fixing objects that needed it (like the follow code, which was a recent fix), and working on areas that were open-ended in 2009. Some of these areas were things like Outpost-1 in space, and some of the areas all over FluxWorld, (River Accessible areas). As always, these various areas are driven by popular demand.

I always had plans for areas south of the main river, including islands that can be reached via the main river, which is surprisingly easy to do in Flux, but not apparent to the players. The hooks to these varied areas were created long ago, but will only now be apparent as they get developed.

I expect that the places to visit might grow by a good 50-100% over the following months, though some of you may still never see it, I am used to that, the exploration of FluxWorld is long and adventurous, as it should be. If there is not a surprise, almost each and every day, one of us is not doing our job!

Most objects here are well developed, and even though some of them could be tweaked further, its the areas themselves, which need to be fleshed out. Those new areas could well lead to new objects, as needed, to support that new land, but its really the lands itself, which need some thought these days.

I hope to entice more of you to have a look around, and see what you can find!

Flux has been a busy world this past August!

Not only have some of the RPG areas been hooked in, and new weapons made available (Battle Ax), But a lot of little things have been fixed which were not working correctly (Fruit bearing trees and bushes, Hidden rooms 'Wall of Fame').

The Bank has been changed to allow customers to make their own accounts. Suzette the Sexy Barmaid has been added to FluxBarOne.

Flight Operations gained the long awaited Flight Ops and a control tower above it with views in 8 directions.

The entire 'Outback' has been implemented (some 30 rooms).

The Main Beach in the Outback has an interactive FirePit, which you can feed fuel to keep the fire burning.

The Glass Walkway (from Level 3 to Condo Ave) can now view the people in the Main Promenade.

The Chess Set is now more complete.

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All in all, a busy month of programming. The experience should be MUCH better than before, and helpful suggestions by a few new(ish) users makes it better.

I have no idea *why* August tends to be the month of all months for FluxWorld Development, but over 4 years, this has been proven to be the case.

In Fluxworld, after designing pre-programmed failures into the equipment after some set amount of time (10,000 hrs usually), it became apparent that with all of this built at roughly the same time, it was all failing about the same time.

To slow or change this, a new verb was added for maintainers, called refurbish. It pays almost as well as a true fix, but is based on the MBTF (Mean Time Between Failure) and the actual hours since the last fix or refurbish. If actual time in use is 5,000 hours on something with a 10,000 MTBF then 50% of the fix amount is paid.

This optional verb can be used to clean up some older equipment to prevent a string of failures on the Grid. This also adds to some of the realism of the simulation, as the goal is to keep the grid up and running at capacity or better.

TheGrid always evolves as we add power sources and drains to it, from the solar sources which have to account for daytime and cloud cover, the the windmills which must be ever-mindful of the breezes.

Just learning how to manage the Grid on an hourly and daily basis is useful instruction.

While working within the FluxWorld power grid, and enhancing the system, I have come to understand some interesting things while simulating a live power grid with loads.

Even though my system knows all of the loads and all of the sources (which a real-time power grid may not), there is always room for management. I can see why the implementation of a “smart-grid” is so important.

I spend my time managing turning sources on and off as needed, for maximum efficiency.

Even though my loads dont change from day to night, they very well could, and because of solar and wind power, my sources change as well.

The effective management of energy resources on the grid by not putting more power than is needed on the wires, and yet, not having insufficient power (causing brown-outs or black-outs) is indeed an interesting ad tricky balance. Of course, the “brute-force” method of ensuring there is never a black out is to over-power the grid all the time. Unused power sits on the wires as “potential”, but it was still generated and used resources to put it there.

None of this, of course, speaks of storage. TheGrid is TheGrid, and has never utilized storage (like a battery). There are a few methods I have heard of, like pumping water up into a reservoir at night, to generate power during the day, but thats about it. There is just no good (efficient) way to save off terawatts or petawatts of energy at this time.

As we use more and more energy, all of this will become more critical, if we are to survive.

After taking some time away, this weekend was filled with walking, flying, exploring, note-taking and killing some Sneeds, Trils, and Mepons as a fun diversion. Along the way, there was some fixes and fine-tuning to many things (as always).

Many areas and objects were looked at, from pets to area expansions. More fruit bearing trees and bushes added so that somewhere, there is now pickable fruit of some type available all year round.

There is always room for more area expansion, new objects, and refinements.