Canonical dictionary for this documentation

Where a word is used in the documentation for The Great Game and its related projects, this file describes the canonical meaning of that word. This is because a lot of the concepts in play are messy and ambiguous, so that at times even I am confused by what I mean. The presence of this file is an acknowledment of this difficulty, and an implicit admission that not all the documentation is, at this stage anyway, consistent.

Actor

An actor is a thing which performs actions within the game world. Thus a tree is (almost certainly) not an actor, and things like sheep and rabbits that run about are probably not actors, but an animal which may pro-actively interact with the player character (such as a predator, or a beast of burden, or even a prey species which may flee) is an actor. In god mode, if implemented, the player can inhabit any actor within the game world.

Agent

Agent is probably just a synonym for actor. If it is different in any way, that way has not yet been determined.

Gossip

A gossip is an actor who exchanges news with other actors, even when the player character is not nearby. Thus gossips are the mechanism by which news propagates through the game world, and also the mechanism by which information degrades. Broadly:

1. innkeepers (and possibly some others) are gossips who do not move; rather, they gather information from gossips who do move, and all non-player characters local to the are deemed to know everything that their local innkeeper knows;
2. merchants (and possibly some others) are gossips who do move from place to place, and thus transfer news.

See the spread of knowledge in a large game world.

Heightmap

A heightmap is a raster image of the world, such that the intensity in which an area is coloured represents the value of some variable, by default height, of that area.

Holding

A holding is a polygon ‘owned’ by an actor on which are built appropriate building units representing the actor’s craft and status.

Location

A location value is a sequence comprising at most the x/y or x/y/z coordinate location and the ids of the settlement and region (possibly hierarchically) that contain the location. If the :z coordinate is not supplied the terrain surface hieght at that x/y location will be assumed. If the x/y is not local to the home of the receiving agent, they won’t remember it and won’t pass it on; if any of the ids are not interesting, they won’t be passed on. So location information will degrade progressively as the item is passed along.

It is assumed that the :home of a character is a location in this sense.

Examples

1. [{:x 5445678 :y 9684351}]
2. [{:x 5445678 :y 9684351} :karalin-palace :hanshua]

Merchant

A merchant is an actor and gossip who trades goods, and incidentally conveys news, between markets.

Non-player character

A non-player character is, for our purposes, an actor capable of engaging in conversation with the player character. Note, however, that, from a software point of view, the player character is just a special case of a non-player character.

Player character

The player character is the unique actor within the game currently controlled and inhabited by the player.

Route

A route is a pre-prepared path through the game world that an actor may take. Most actors are not constrained to follow routes, but in general routes have lower traversal cost than other terrain.