We're pondering how to compute the traffic within a city in High Frontier. We know how to do traffic simulation in general, but now that it comes to actually incorporating it into the game, there's more than one way to approach it.


First, the goals:

1. Draw more little people walking around on heavily-used paths than on lightly-used ones.
2. Figure out which buildings are underutilized, so maybe we can abandon them.

And now, the basic approaches I see:

1. Generate random building-to-building trips (weighted by distance and probably by building type, e.g., residential much more often connects to commercial than to residential or agricultural). OR,

2. Actually make up a little record for every resident in the city, which would include where they live, where they work (or go to school), and where they typically shop and go for recreation. Generate trips on this data.

A city in High Frontier has typically on order of 1000 residents, though it could be more or less. So the amount of data in approach 2 isn't outrageous. Obviously it's a lot more complex, though, so we would want to be sure it's worth it.

Approach 2 would probably result in a more believable city, in that we could give each resident a unique Squawker handle, and make them squawk about their lives (e.g., looking for a home or job if we haven't assigned them one yet). We could potentially let you click on a resident (though they're very tiny!), and see where they live, work, etc. You might come to recognize certain residents tending to appear in certain parts of the city. And it seems like the best way to make sure the traffic paths are realistic.

On the other hand, it is a lot of work, and might be one of those cases where there is more complexity to the sim than players can actually perceive. Especially when you get 1000 or more residents in a city, the odds of seeing the same resident enough times to notice is pretty slim. The random building-to-building trips, if we weight them properly, ought to generate very similar traffic patterns but be a lot lighter in terms of both computation and data storage.

Opinions, questions, and random thoughts are more than welcome!

It's taken a while, what with the holidays and all, but we are making progress!  Today for the first time, we got multiple different people moving around in a High Frontier colony, all with proper animations, and facing in the proper directions:



There is still a much more to do, but this is a big milestone on the way to version 0.21!

(Posting this on behalf of Al Globus, a colleague with whom I've done some space settlement design work.)

I'm writing today to ask you to fill out a survey at
https://sjsu.qualtrics.com//SE/?SID=SV_cIodLeiNTfaVN5P.
It's short, a one page intro then eight required and six optional
questions.  The survey usually takes less than ten minutes to complete.
You will not be asked for contact information and there are no ads. Your
answers will be used to help inform the design of a new generation of
space settlements.

Please forward this to your friends!

Thank you,

Al Globus
Tom Marotta
Bryan Versteeg
and The ELEO Group

High Frontier is written in Unity, which for years has lacked support for multiple display screens.  However, the very latest version has finally added multi-monitor support.

So that makes me wonder, what (if anything) should we do with this in High Frontier?

I guess the obvious solution would be to have an external view of your colony on one screen, with the interior view on the other.  Or more generally, in manage mode, we could just have two different views onto the same colony — which could be two different interior views as well.

But that could be quite tricky to pull off, code-wise.  We never expected to be simulating two different hab parts at the same time.  It *ought* to work OK... the data is all encapsulated... but it would not be trivial.

How many people here have multiple screens?  (I, for example, work on a laptop with an external monitor attached.)  And, apart from two views of your colony in manage mode, what else would you like to use the second screen for?

Mine was bright and sunny high -5C. How was yours.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos clearly has the right idea:

http://www.techinsider.io/jeff-bezos-space-economy-dream-2015-12

I wonder if he's aware of the High Frontier video game?  (If you're out there: Hi Jeff!  Keep building upward!)

They did it!  I'm not even going to bother to post a link, because it's all over the place.  Unless you've been living in a cave, you already know that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have now landed a rocket from space — and in last night's case, this is the first (and most expensive) stage of a large orbital launcher.  The era of reusable rockets is here.

This cost analysis shows that when Falcon 9 starts reusing its first stage, it will be about the same or cheaper than Skylon, even under the most optimistic projections of Skylon's cost.  And if they can make it fully reusable, it will be significantly cheaper.  And the Falcon Heavy, with reuse, will be substantially cheaper than that.

I've been watching space for decades, and seen a whole lot of nothing much going on... but I believe this is changing now.  It's important that we have not one but two companies that have now demonstrated reusable rocketry, and there are others in the wings.  They will be competing to lower prices, which opens up new markets, which increases flight rate, which lowers prices.  I think we will look back on 2015 as the tipping point.

But hey, that's just me.  What do you all think?

This is about the forth transparent metal I've read about, each with a different use.

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-transparent-metal-has-been-developed-for-smartphone-and-tv-displays

This stuff would be good for some place cold places with lots of sunshine, Mars. Not so good for space stations.

This will help make space colonies self sustaining.

http://www.ecouterre.com/grow-your-own-microbial-leather-in-your-kitchen-diy-tutorial/