At the awakening stage, you have quite a few items, residents and buildings, so the game can afford to load every item of the resident and building. But with the increase in settlements by the beginning of the social stage, this will become a problem for performance, so I think that simplifying these aspects to numbers is necessary, because otherwise computers simply will not cope with such volumes of calculations, which will make thrive an unplayable game.
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Exactly. Which is why I already had this specific idea in mind for when we at some point might get that far along in development…
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This would be required for society/industrial stage to work at all for pretty much any person unless they happen to have access to a supercomputer.
I guess simplifying things could have a few stages as the player’s civ grows (increasing the amount of objects) and as the player’s POV moves away, for instance at a moderate distance it would just reduce the less noticable details and then far away buildings could just be turned into blurs even.
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LOD is not a revolutionary idea. I think the actual problem is simulating all of a society, and the resultant problem is that because of awakening stage, we’ll start off simulating literally everything, then fade into simulating broad strokes. Basically, how on earth do you transition from Ancestors to Victoria 3 to Stellaris smoothly? I don’t know. I think I’d be really nice if you could zoom in on what an individual citizen is doing, but that’s quite ambitious. Plus, all three stages aren’t designed and planned fully yet. Breaking each stage into hidden sub stages totally works I think. So long as it doesn’t limit the player, having the player slowly go from controlling individual hunters to plotting entire armies would work. Issue is if the player has some unhinged plan that relies on two guys, or worse, the system only has one check (I.E. has farming and advanced buildings been researched) it makes to send you to the next sub stage, so you could totally get thousands and thousands of hunters in your primitive tribe, and because your ecology is weird or you’re an insanely successful invasive species you can feed everyone without developing any tech. It genuinely isn’t the worst thing in the world if the game required 32-64 gigs of ram for a 1.0 release because that’s a while off and ram isn’t getting more expensive anytime soon (apple users can suffer) but the sub stages should be flexible and work to reduce the work the computer is doing.
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Maybe the level of detail should depend on the strenght of one’s computer?