Developing a Persistent Space Colony “Sim” in 3D

Developing a comprehensive “simulation” of space colonization presents many challenges, not the least are the traditional “scientific” and “physical” issues and modeling of the simulation. The struggle is with translating the depth and complexity into a simple simulation – with adequate analogs to “real” tasks and with designing the interface to represent those tasks, success & failure, and script this into something entertaining and addictive to “play.” There are two potential markets here – educational purposes, where the scientific intent is to educate the user on “how to survive” an unknown and hostile new world; or the pure gaming side to develop scenarios and “quests” that bring adventure into the experience.

Adventuring MMOs, such as WoW and EQ2 and others, have greatly bifurcated the “crafting” and “adventuring” requiring a great deal of “downtime” from either aspect to move forward. In a real simulation of colonization, the exploitation of the local resources, processing of those resources, both for survival and for trade become absolutely critical. In short – given finite resources, how do you best manage these to survive and thrive when isolated from other help?

I hope to discuss various elements of this challenge and work out some of the conumdrums as I develop “Colony” further.