The Jupiter dream

Even when you'd give them wings (or allowing them to phase through objects) - that wouldn't solve the problem.
The big issue isn't a single lumberjack pathfinding his way around and calculating this through your 'offline period'.

To stick to the banished example (because Banished has the whole population simulation down).
A 200 pop town ends up with a bunch of farmers, foresters, woodcutters, forages, fishers and other professions.
Each of these have their own pathfinding.

Yet Banished has distinct limitations. Each 'worker' has a restricted field in which he plies his trade - exception being builders that can roam around quite far.
You might have seen the deathmarches caused when a builder believes the best course of action for building a bridge is to go the long way around?
Another limitation in Banished is the map, its not indefinite, the map is finite.
A third limitation is that Banished is SP exclusively. Its all happening in real-time.


Now I won't claim that Banished has a perfect pathfinding system - improvements can always be made.
But even the most efficient system you could make would fall victim to exponential growth.
Already Godus is looking at population counts in the thousands *per player*.
Granted, a large portion of these are breeders that can theoretically (for now) be kept inside if you don't take the follower friendship upgrade.

But lets assume for a second that all these breeders are affected by that meaning that 100% of your population roams around and has some degree of pathfinding active.
Now we're looking at 4 players per hubworld I believe? So we're looking at 20~24k population roaming around on a single hub (as far as is currently explained).
In the current version of Godus there is no pathfinding going on like that, this is why we're finding followers lost on the tops of mountains.

Now I'm assuming here that in the future, Godus' population requirements will increase as the ages go up. So we're looking at upwards of 20k pathfinding tasks per hub, multiplied by the number of hubs.
No matter how good your system is... Thats gonna be painful to run.


Possible? Yes... Especially when using tricks to fudge the reality. But painful still.
(Personally I still don't believe that Godus can ever run the online bit the way it originally described it, and I'm fairly certain that it'll be entirely instanced and only active for the ACTIVE players while the others just have some numbers running in the background at best.)

Slightly related. There is the attempt to use search algorithms to display graphics with unlimited details (graphics so good and detailed that you can't improve them any further). The problem is saving the world and animating it.

I think we left our "Can Do" attitude in the fiction section, and I do believe I saw Peter wandering around there aswell.

I see where you're coming from, but when working within certain parameters you'll have to draw boundaries of what is realistically possible.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for these things to work. But given the restrictions given, you have to make choices.
In this case the realistic choice would be to EITHER use tricks and go with a full on massive world with tons of people online *OR* go with a more elaborate system, but restrict it to local only play (perhaps some locally hosted online instanced matches inbetween).

The scaling just wouldn't work. Why do so many elaborate resource management and strategy games limit themselves to local only while the more competative online variants try to keep things simple? It has very much to do with this same concept.

Imagine for a second if EUIV or Civilization V did all the resource processing in realtime like Banished does. It'd scale out of control quickly (considering that the large Civ V maps are already taxing their system heavily and the modded larger maps are known to crash often).

So at that point you have to make a choice, do you want your Jupitersize world? Or would you rather have more depth and complexity within your game?
Or alternately, if you're gonna try both, where do you draw the line - where is your focus?
Something that from outside observation seems to be lacking in the case of 22cans, because they've been going back and forth on statements claiming they literally want to do it all and satisfy everyone that likes each aspect.

As such, rather than speculating some ideal vision and betting money on wishful thinking - it'd be better for everyone to set some realistic expectations and work from there.
Granted, innovation rarely comes without taking some risks - but there are limits to taking risks aswell. Before taking such risks, it'd be wise to have atleast some reasonable expectation that what you're planning on doing can be done within a reasonable timeframe and budget.

I could give a stuff what the size of relates to. I do not care to measure it. I just need a fully dynamic expanding world to cope with whatever minutes or hours I've put into it.

There is also the aspect of calculation power of a smartphone.
A smart phone doesn't have equal hardware to a PC.
Also they have a limited battery, and should not run at max performance for extended periods of time.

So I believe a current generation smartphone won't be able to pathfind 1000+ people



And GODUS is a smartphone app.

The "PC" version is the mobile version running in an emulator.

...I'm not sure to laugh or to cry - but that is FAR too close to the truth to be comfortable...

Jupiter Sized Planet - one hot air promise if we ever saw one.