Simulation design is much like the real thing

Designing the game or simulator is much like making the trip for real. That is a rather bold statement and I don’t want to ever trivialize the efforts of the brave men and women that venture into space for mankind nor the endless hours of work by top engineers to make this happen, but the path is similar none the less.

The Colony ET project is about the destination and not the trip so I will forego the construction of the rocket, the fuel, and the 6 month adventure just to get to Mars and look at this from the point when we crack the hatch at the landing site for the first time.

We have decided to make the trip to another world and now we have to decide how to do it and at what cost. In the game development cycle we try to get a vision of the technical issues to overcome and how long those issues will take to resolve. Time relates directly to money in the case of a game since salaries need to be paid and facilities need to be maintained. In contrast, the companies that have to design and build the parts on a contract basis still have the same types of investments in people and facilities to bring the project to reality.

In the game we have to make the landing zone and paint it to look like where we want to go. That means we make the hills and valleys, put in the sky, the sun and add in the minerals that might be found there. Now that we have a place to exist we have to design the craft that will land our brave souls. The design of the game will draw upon reality in shape and function of what we see in artist conceptions and engineering reality. The landing craft and the first habitat module will probably be the same object and will have a place to sleep, some equipment for exploration, a way to generate power, oxygen and something to eat or a way to make food.

In reality, the engineers need to make the landing craft out of a material that can withstand a landing on the planet, will protect the travelers from storms, and form a mostly air tight seal to provide a safe atmosphere. It will have a door to get outside or a “sally port” double door system to protect the interior atmosphere. The craft will probably have a portal or window to see outside, floor, walls and a ceiling.

The game has mostly the same requirements. When the artists create the structure they have to be sure the space is air tight even though we don’t have actual air in the game we can detect small cracks in the geometry by using light to find the holes but the requirement is the same for both simulation and reality. The skin for our game craft is just polygons and texture. I could add in the ability for our simulation to cause damage to the skin over time from a corrosive atmosphere but we have to make the decision of what is important to the simulation. For Colony ET we want the users to experience the day to day problems facing the explorers to set up a permanent presence on an alien planet and not the microscopic level of reality.

So the big decision by the simulation creator is how much it too much?  How much is not enough. We are giving the user a graphical interface for equipment like a soil sampler. The user will put the sample “here” and press the “sample” button and wait for the result. We could make the user fire up the spectrometer, weigh the sample etc but that might be too much detail for some users and yet not enough for others. The getting of the sample from some location on the planet, the mechanism to test the sample and the data derived from the sample is enough to approximate the activity for our needs. Unless someone wants to pay us to code things down to the nth level of reality I think this will be enough for now. The Colony ET project will have plants that grow over time, drilling machines, wells, photo voltaic cells, batteries, spectrometers and as many other “real” things as we can add to the simulation. We want the users to get the feel of being there and having to deal with the realities like “did someone bring the battery? Krap, Bob how bout you run back and get a battery, oh and bring an extra pv panel while yer at it.”