Wow, his description of work-related depression really hits home for me. I wish I could find that spark that he found, but I'm afraid all of the passion was ground out of me years ago.
It is really a great story. A bunch of ideas ... maybe some will help ...
Embracing curiosity and exploration can be life-changing; embracing play, lifelong - it's a universal form of lifelong exploration among primates. Also, plenty of research supports exploration's powerful affect on aging minds (though I don't know your age) in many ways. And as a wonderful effect, you find new things that you love. And remember that part of exploration is dead ends and failures - if you aren't failing, you aren't trying.
Also, life changes take a bit of time, like turning a big ship - an accumulation of things need to change. Just beginning to head in that direction - changing the derivative of the derivative of your path, in geek terms - can change your outlook, give you direction and goals; you're embarked on a long journey.
There's no panacea. Life can still feel pointless at times. For me, at least, the trick is to recognize it's my emotions, to have compassion for them - life ain't easy - and to put my head down and just do the things I know are right. And when I come out of it, I feel proud of what I've done and in a better place to move forward. Always do things that leave you a little better off than when you started.
This game was deeply important to me: it's the first time I remember explicitly recognizing different ideological and religious beliefs abstracted away from their particular human instantiations.
I absolutely loved the different factions and what they believed in. It always made me wonder what types of beliefs aliens would have, if they exist.
The political system is really great; even though there are only four fields with four options each, it is wonderful that the options aren’t automatically correlated. If you want to have a free market police state, you can. I honestly think playing this game in childhood might get people to think about little bit more about what their politics actually mean (I mean we could also have read some books, but that’s impossible). It also gives just the right feeling for a sci-fi game, because authors love playing with weird political configurations.
I love sci-fi (and fantasy) for that reason (amongst others of course), even if nine times out of ten it's a variation on human cultures, or reduced down to a single dimension, at least early on - Elves are elitist racists, Klingons are angry, etc. But long running series can / will often add nuance over time, with the stereotypes fighting with their own "nature".
It is a shame that "Civilization: Beyond Earth" was such a disappointment. Instead of interesting leaders, factions, and ideologies, we got "Space Africa" and "Space Australia".
I wonder if there some legal issue preventing Firaxis from making a true Centauri remake.
I feel like Beyond Earth was a great game trying to break out of a mediocre one. I love the way the quest system forces you down a particular victory condition, the way you can bully other factions using fear rather than respect, and how the affinity system makes factions that truly feel different toward the end game. I hate how you can pick a quest pathway that you don't have the resources to follow (e.g. you might inadvertently pick a purity quest answer, but only have access to xenomass), how dumb the AI is at victory conditions, and how uninteresting the tech tree (er, I mean web) is.
Through SMAC, I found ideas about how future societies might organize themselves to ensure human survival and progress. I found ideas about speculative technologies and how they could reshape civilization. I found that playing the game made me feel less alone, because it revealed loneliness as a universal human condition—timeless and unyielding. I found hope in a vision of humanity finding its place among the stars. I found myself grappling with ideas far larger than myself. I found my empathy measured by in-game choices. I found that history, like the game, carries no moral compass—it only moves forward.
To those wondering why "planetfall" for Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: it was a recurrent term in the game, the "start of history".
And the starting prompt was:
> $NAME3, a new era of struggle and opportunity awaits you. The UN Starship Unity has arrived in the Alpha Centauri system after a forty year voyage. All contact with Earth has been lost. After Captain Garland's assassination by an unknown assailant, the crew mutinied and split into factions. In the ensuing conflict, some seized control of the Unity's colony pods. You now shape the destiny of your $<M1:$FACTIONADJ0> faction, which has just made PLANETFALL!
I have no doubt that many people reading this comment section could extract the map data and write a script to translate it to a .CSV very quickly.
But there’s something to be said for a mindless, long-term repetitive project that you can chip away at when you feel like occupying yourself with something unimportant for a bit.
I get this satisfaction from mining big spaces in Minecraft, mindless but satisfying.
Unfortunately this specific activity in Minecraft very easily turns into an enormous time sink which unless I was really too tired to do anything else and sleeping wasn’t an option, I inevitably regret afterwards.
I thought the same. There are a ton of nerds (I count myself among them) who loved this game in its day and would happily take a crack at programmatically extracting these data points.
Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github.
Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.
Reading the description of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I realize the animation series "Scavengers Reign" has a very similar setting (human colonists crash land on a planet that seems to be sentient).
I'll use this opportunity to encourage people to watch this show. If you are a fan of sci-fi (think Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge), you will love this. If you are not, I think you should still give it a try. It is that good.
I love the strange "event" sound, the little bleeps and bloops of the interface, the "pew-pews" of the weapons, and the fantastic voice acting. I've had this game installed on one computer or another since I bought it retail back in '99. It's a work of art. No other Civ game ever matched it for me, no matter how far graphics have come in the last 25+ years.
The one complaint about sound design is how the background music works. I think it starts playing when you’re not active, but on any given playthrough, it never gets a chance to trigger.
There are separate soundtracks for each faction, I think.
The work is great and i like the map and the writeup. Excellent work!
One shortcoming is that its land texture doesn't show any contrasty edges, everything smoothly flows into other regions. We see the mountains but the textures pretty much ignore them and the edges that we see in our planet's texture are missing.
I do kind of agree. One interesting feature of the original map, which makes it look so alien, are the lines of red that cut through everything. I guess it's the xenofungus, but it looks a bit like magma or something, like continents that are being broken apart. This is lost in the new version.
That said, I do appreciate the work that went into this, it looks very cool.
Readit News
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/about/
The long version is even better:
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/on-salva...
Embracing curiosity and exploration can be life-changing; embracing play, lifelong - it's a universal form of lifelong exploration among primates. Also, plenty of research supports exploration's powerful affect on aging minds (though I don't know your age) in many ways. And as a wonderful effect, you find new things that you love. And remember that part of exploration is dead ends and failures - if you aren't failing, you aren't trying.
Also, life changes take a bit of time, like turning a big ship - an accumulation of things need to change. Just beginning to head in that direction - changing the derivative of the derivative of your path, in geek terms - can change your outlook, give you direction and goals; you're embarked on a long journey.
There's no panacea. Life can still feel pointless at times. For me, at least, the trick is to recognize it's my emotions, to have compassion for them - life ain't easy - and to put my head down and just do the things I know are right. And when I come out of it, I feel proud of what I've done and in a better place to move forward. Always do things that leave you a little better off than when you started.
Good luck! I hope that helps!
I absolutely loved the different factions and what they believed in. It always made me wonder what types of beliefs aliens would have, if they exist.
The political system is really great; even though there are only four fields with four options each, it is wonderful that the options aren’t automatically correlated. If you want to have a free market police state, you can. I honestly think playing this game in childhood might get people to think about little bit more about what their politics actually mean (I mean we could also have read some books, but that’s impossible). It also gives just the right feeling for a sci-fi game, because authors love playing with weird political configurations.
I wonder if there some legal issue preventing Firaxis from making a true Centauri remake.
Through SMAC, I found ideas about how future societies might organize themselves to ensure human survival and progress. I found ideas about speculative technologies and how they could reshape civilization. I found that playing the game made me feel less alone, because it revealed loneliness as a universal human condition—timeless and unyielding. I found hope in a vision of humanity finding its place among the stars. I found myself grappling with ideas far larger than myself. I found my empathy measured by in-game choices. I found that history, like the game, carries no moral compass—it only moves forward.
And the starting prompt was:
> $NAME3, a new era of struggle and opportunity awaits you. The UN Starship Unity has arrived in the Alpha Centauri system after a forty year voyage. All contact with Earth has been lost. After Captain Garland's assassination by an unknown assailant, the crew mutinied and split into factions. In the ensuing conflict, some seized control of the Unity's colony pods. You now shape the destiny of your $<M1:$FACTIONADJ0> faction, which has just made PLANETFALL!
Surely there was a more automated solution than to do something 8k times manually?
But there’s something to be said for a mindless, long-term repetitive project that you can chip away at when you feel like occupying yourself with something unimportant for a bit.
Unfortunately this specific activity in Minecraft very easily turns into an enormous time sink which unless I was really too tired to do anything else and sleeping wasn’t an option, I inevitably regret afterwards.
I'll use this opportunity to encourage people to watch this show. If you are a fan of sci-fi (think Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge), you will love this. If you are not, I think you should still give it a try. It is that good.
There are separate soundtracks for each faction, I think.
One shortcoming is that its land texture doesn't show any contrasty edges, everything smoothly flows into other regions. We see the mountains but the textures pretty much ignore them and the edges that we see in our planet's texture are missing.
That said, I do appreciate the work that went into this, it looks very cool.