Hit an interesting wall

I hit a design wall yesterday while working on habitats.

Hold the press

The context: I had started working on the habitat unit-layer entity class. Put very simply, these are the places where crew members sleep, perhaps eat, potentially reproduce, apply hygiene practices, etc. In summary: the places for comfort, privacy and one of the main factors for overall well-being.

This entity class has of course a massive effect on the morale, social cohesion, etc. of crew members.

Well then, what's with the wall? Can't you just get the fuck on with it and call it done?

Well… yeah I could… but it is a fuzzy wall, mind you, one born out of conceptual dependencies and gnawing doubts! This is what a little bird told me:

How can you start working on habitats when you are not even sure about crew members definition?

Hmmmmmmmmm… I thought to myself, hell, the little bird is right. I am putting the cart before the horse, here…

Why the order is wrong

• Fact 1: I have to define crew members anyway
• Fact 2: with crew members done, the wall dissipates and the habitat class flows naturally

You see, my vision of crew members is not for them to have to remain humans as we know them today. Oh no, the vision is very different indeed. All depending on player choice of course but here are some leads/ideas I am currently mulling over:

• Humans start as "baseline" humans
• Humans can become augmented, via cybernetics, genetic improvements or nano machinery

But that's level ZERO; read on for more.

The crew member class ideas

First of all the naming convention is wrong: "crew member" is too reductive and will become too narrow very quickly. "Human" is a possibility but will become diverged from at the later tech tiers. "Person" is meh and too… current if you get my drift.

But here's a much better name for the entity class: Sophont, defined as:

An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being. The word does not apply to machines unless they have true artificial intelligence, rather than mere processing capacity.

It has this sci-fi feel that covers both baseline humans and ultra-advanced versions of them. Which naturally brings us to the very rough and unordered following ideas:

• (repeat) Humans start as "baseline" humans
• (repeat) Humans can become augmented, via cybernetics, genetic improvements or nano machinery
• Humans can become virtual beings
• Humans can incarnate into dynamic hosts
• Humans birth/death cycle evolves, along with their reproduction mode
• Existence gradually moves away from life and becomes more about continuity
• Identity splits from corporality; one can exist without the other
• Avatars/hosts can be manufactured on demand
• Collective minds…
• Mind backups, threading, merging and cloning…
• Then what becomes of "artificial" in "AI"?
• And probably many others I have not even started thinking about!

All being optional and for the player to choose from, of course.

Given the list above and the huge difference there is likely to exist between:

• Case A: a human, even augmented
• Case B: a post-human, able to upload/download their personality to built-on-demand shapes, whether human or not?
• Case C: a being whose identity is purely mathematical and whose substrate has long evolved from flesh and neurons but is more based on topological folds and quantum foam?

When you consider this chasm, it is easy to see why the concept of "habitats" has to cover a lot of ground; but that ground needs to remain relevant for whichever type of Sophont enjoys it! As of course the needs of all three cases are vastly different in terms of comfort, morale, etc. Assuming Case C is even subjected to the concept of "Morale", etc.

• A baseline human crew might need private quarters, a mess hall for bonding, and a gym to burn stress. Not to mention a place for number two. Heh, of course yes.
• But once they start running on a quantum substrate with threaded instances, that same "habitat" might need massive compute clusters, low-latency neural links, and shared simulation spaces instead of physical beds.

So what?

Long story short, this all means I need to spend some time working on the Sophont class. This will be extremely interesting, as this is no longer about machinery; this is about starting crew members, how to nurture them, improve them individually and as a group, and how to evolve them!

All this needs to be designed in the light of faction core values and governance systems (which I have started working on), to potentially identify problems, incompatibilities that players would face and make relevant choices out of.

Then only habitats will come; and other classes as well: entertainment, social hubs, governance & control units, and so on. With an overarching rule: while it might be easy to design self-contained "performance" entity classes and types (engines, weapons, etc.), designing ones linked or dedicated to Sophonts must take into account the natures of the latter.

Assigning the concepts of "class" and "types" to humans may seem a bit cold, but we need to systematise all this, otherwise pure chaos beckons, spaghetti code accumulates and a Big Ball Of Mud is born. :-) Trying to avoid that at all costs…

Ok, now where is that drawing board…?