Topological Ship Maps

[alexanderson1993]

Lilah on Discord suggested an adjustment to how we store deck information that seems really interesting to me, so I figured we could have a boarder discussion about it before progressing on ship map development.

The current plan for the ship map is to use a background image for each deck, and have the rooms and hallways modeled with a node/edge graph. It's simple, relatively easy to assemble, and provides sufficient data to let crew members wander along corridors and into rooms.

Lilah's suggestion was to create more topologically accurate rooms. That means modeling each wall as a path, and each room or hallway as a collection of paths. Both paths and the rooms constructed by the paths can have their own attributes. This means the entire ship map can be defined with data, and that data can model more information about the ship, like the structural integrity of the walls themselves, hull breaches, how toxic gasses or heat flows in and out of rooms via the walls, etc.

arcs:
    arc1: (//specifies the bridge, less the segment connecting to the hallway), wall
    arc2: (//specifies the segment shared by the bridge and the hallway), (door, (none, none))
    arc3: (//specifies the lower hallway segment), wall
    arc4: (//specifies the upper hallway segment), wall
    arc5: (//specifies the segment connecting engineering to the hallway), (door, (none, none))
    arc6: (//specifies the upper segment of engineering), wall
    arc7: (//specifies the lower segment of engineering), wall
    arc8: (//specifies the connector between science and engineering), (door, (key1, none))
    arc9: (//specifies the rest of science), wall

entities:
    bridge{
        (arc1, arc2)
        type: bridge
        traversal: 8
    }
    
    hallway{
        (arc2, arc3, arc5, arc4)
        type: hallway
        traversal: 10
        obstruction: none
    }
    
    engineering{
        (arc5, arc8, arc7)
        type: engineering
        traversal: 6
    }

    biolab{
        (arc8, arc9)
        type: lab
        traversal: 5
        status: on fire
    }

For pathfinding purposes, this would require creating a grid of points within the ship map topology that crew members can wander to, which makes entity's movement around rooms a bit more realistic, but increases the complexity and memory required for doing pathfinding.

There are a number of downsides. First, there aren't really any good, cheap tools I could find for generating topoJSON (the specific format described above) data. We would likely have to create our own path editor for the ship map, and making what is effectively a vector editing tool seems a little outside the scope of what we are actually trying to do here.

Second, building ship maps is already planned to be a complicated process, since you have to first create the SVG or raster image, then overlay the nodes and edges on top of it and add all the necessary properties. Modeling each wall separately and then combining them to create rooms seems like even more effort.

My takeaway: This is a really cool idea with a lot of possibilities. If we were a AAA game studio with the time and resources to build this out, it would be an incredible feature of the overall simulation. But given that we don't have as much time or resources, and given that one of the goals of the project is to make user-generated content easy to make, I don't think we should move forward with this.

The node/edge graph is more of an approximation than the topological approach described here, but I think it can give us 80% of what topological ship maps can give, while being a little less complex and requiring a bit less data and configuration.

I would love to hear what other folks think, though. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe this would be more valuable than I realize. Let me know what you think.

[alexanderson1993]

It's been a week since I posted this, so I'm going to say this proposal isn't popular enough to be the default option.

THAT BEING SAID - I still think it's a great idea with good merits, just a lot of tradeoffs. It might be worth exploring as an option for advanced ship maps some time in the future. For now, we'll proceed with the node graph-based ship map.