Will the game present alternative ways of developing technologies (like steampunk or biopunk), or at least part of them?
Define them!
Steampunk, sure in the sense that steam is a great power source. It can even be used to power weapons, steam cannons were kinda usable in their heyday, even if no one ever went to the effort to use them in combat, and military airguns made good used of motors because pressurizing them is slow. Also, airships! They’re pretty awesome! Will the game present steam as a viable alternative to electricity and internal combustion engines and nuclear power? No, I assume not. Examples of why that could happen in any scientifically sensible way would be if a previous species evolves sapiance, used all the fossil fuels and uranium, but made such a huge global warming it made a second Cambrian edit: Carboniferous (lol I’m so dumb) so there’s coal. Extremely unlikely given that animals already would have evolved to eat bark and global warming doesn’t last that long, but maybe the previous creature used a super nuke or something.
Biopunk??? Ohh yeah that doesn’t sound likely. Biotech has been shot down before, and the idea of alternatives to regular tech, in especially the context of underwater, is basically a punching bag. Regular technology just makes more sense. There will almost certainly be a biotech underwater civ mod if/when we get that far. Just get that and hope it’s balanced and fun.
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I didn’t mean full steampunk or biopunk, I meant that will there be any alternatives in technology? For example, could there be temporary steampunk due to deep oil and uranium deposits? Or a bit of biopunk in the form of genetic engineering? And I didn’t mean only them, I meant all similar genres of alternative technologies.
I hope the tech three isn’t 100% linear, and I assume it won’t be, so ? Having trouble knowing what you want here
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I mean the possibility of developing non-linearly in terms of technology. For example, on one planet there is almost no oil, but a lot of coal, so steampunk technologies can be used here up to the invention of coal liquefaction.
Expecting it to be possible: yes, forced linearity is dumb.
Expecting it to be aesthetically pleasing: maybe not.
Expecting it to be forced on first time players: heck no.
Yeah aside from that i don’t really know. Leaving now, any better answers could come from a dev or just smarter person.
If I’m anyway up to speed on what the discussion is about, I don’t think it is in any way infeasible to have technology alternatives and multiple different paths through the eventual Thrive tech web. Though we need to consider our limited development resources. I foresee there being much more slight alternatives to technology rather than completely different ones, because then if those technologies set the world on a vastly different course we might need to make like 5 tech webs instead of just 1 and that’s over 5 times more effort as the increased scope of the game makes everything exponentially harder like testing all combinations of features and fixing unforeseen interactions of different systems with each other.
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Even games like Paradox’s Civ clone don’t have truly exponential tech trees. You’ve got several different variant tech trees for each level, but IIRC they’re all relatively simplistic, and they’re modular rather than exponential.
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From what I’ve heard instead of making like a million node tech tree it is planned to instead make a more creative system which should allow for pretty much anything realistic to be discovered/made.
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I don’t see how such a thing could happen. I think you may be mixing up the concepts of technologies and the tech editor, which is about customizing for example a woodcutting axe. So we would have an infinite number of different variants of axes but they’d all be covered under the same researched technology.
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Oh I see now, I used to think that such a “dynamic web” would be conceivable…
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Some more branches I think are nice:
Atompunk: I think this would absolutely be added (In the later 60-70s "Stanford toruses, Nonsentient robots, horrible computers and AI), as nothing in (its later form) is implausible scientifically, but by the time you could build stanford toruses, you might need digital computers.
Dieselpunk: Most dieselpunk designs from 1930-50 were kinda doomed, but I could see primitive suborbital pre-atomic era rockets and the like
Clockpunk(As in renaissance-era but futuristic) Obviously would need to advance in a more mainstream way to get any form of space travel, but an ENIAC-sized analog difference engine seems very wasteful but possible enough.
Raypunk Probably not. Not gonna say much, might think of reasons later, just doesn’t seem realistic
EDIT: Cyberpunk is just early-mid space stage but with corporate elements anyway, definitely achievable, and we are living in a sort of proto-cyberpunk anyway.
Biopunk seems achievable. Not with underwater civilizations, not going to say much about that, that is the Thrive topic. Biopunk is just if cyberpunk focused more on genetic that cybernetic augmentations.
As you have discussed, steampunk is mostly achievable.
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Is raypunk about light or something?
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It’s like that 1930s-50s sci fi, where people go on intergalactic adventures and don’t even have orbital habitats.
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Actually with the computer it would be cool if a civilization could invent mechanical claculators and computers much earlier and maybe have a Great Project on the level of building some sort of wonder to build the first mechanical calculator or computer.
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How big would such a mechanical computer even need to be to match the power of an average modern PC?
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it could never. The speed of light is too low (let alone the speed of sound, which is the speed mechanical force tends to move). If a cpu was the size of a planet then light would take around a 7th of a second to cross from one end to another. If you’re building a single cpu core, that is unacceptable. Modern cpus have multi-gigahertz bus speeds, and that’s required for the single threaded performance of a modern pc. Scaling up a design increases the maximum theoretical performance in FLOPS or IPS or whatever, but drastically decreases the single threaded performance. If each cpu core is even a few times bigger than a modern SOC, you will never reach modern cpu speeds. You could catch up in embarrassingly parallel tasks by building billions of cores, but in tasks that require only one thread, or even tasks that just require a lot of memory bandwidth per thread, you’re probably doomed. This leads to the interesting conclusion that making a 4090 competitor is fundamentally easier than making a Celeron competitor.
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But just how close could we come then? Did anybody ever try making even just a mechanical calculator?
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The Z1 used floating point numbers in 1930s and was powered by the motor of a vacuum cleaner. Add pipelining and build 16 of those and add condition code masking, and a LOT more memory, and you have the world’s worst gpu execution unit thing.
Multiplication solely for fun
the 4090 has 16384 of these made up things to my mathing (plus raytracing cores, actual memory, tensor cores. ect). However, the Z1 ran at 1 hertz. The 4090 has 2.5 gigahertz. 16384 * 2.5 billion (giga = billion) * 2 tons (weight of z1) * 16 * cost of pipelining (I’ll assume 2) = 2,621,440 billion. Thats about a 3000th of the weight of the earth, or a 30th of the mass of the entire crust, for solely processing. Memory would need to be MUCH larger.
Point being, floating point numbers are doable. Once you add in electromechanical switches… the harvard computers are arguably turing complete.
plus, as far as space efficiency, curta calculator. Can do full on useful algorithms and stuff.
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Mechanical Calculators were in use for over 300 years, fairly widely for over 100 as I understand it, and they are talking about putting a Mechanical Computer on a probe to they want to sent to Venus. Granted, mechanical computers are not efficient and very limited in what they can do, they could never hope to match an digital one, but they are not obsolete yet.
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