Holocene MMORPG

[joen]

I've just released the first semi-stable version of Holocene (a fast time simulation based MMORPG) at http://holocene.co.  Here's the marketing blurb from the front page:

Lead your people as they emerge from a hunter-gatherer society in 10,000 BC to settle in fertile river valleys as farmers. Peacefully co-exist with your neighbors, trading in goods and technology, or force them into your empire at spearpoint. Play Holocene in your browser now, and meet players from around the world.

and a few screenshots:








and a youtube video:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/f0eU0xJiR_o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/f0eU0xJiR_o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

I've tried to use a simulation model that is as close to possible to an alternate Earth in 10,000 BC as possible.  Rainfall, temperature, resource production and consumption, etc are all based upon the best data that I could find.

As far as client libraries, I use

• WorldWind java 1.4 (which uses jogl 1.1.2) is for the basic 3D environment
• Ardor for a fairly simple fractal algorithm to generate somewhat complex terrain

I chose to deploy this as an applet, as that's the only way that I know of to include google ads (which are not up yet), but I'm open to other deployment mechanisms.

The list of things I still plan on putting in game is too large to list completely at this point, but includes things such as a tutorial/manual/wiki, language, religion, and better ground cover (trees/shrubs/etc).

Feel free to play with it - it's not necessary to create an account to look around in game, but is necessary if you'd like to have any cities to grow/attack from.  Note that if you do create an account, resources are only gathered once per game year, which is about 6 hours of real world time, so you won't have any military units to attack with right away.

I'd love it if you could provide any feedback  

http://holocene.co

[tyeeeee1]

I've tried playing your game but as far as I can see at the moment there's nothing to do except look at places on the map and zoom in/out. Is there a tutorial somewhere for this? Also, there should be tooltips for the little buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen.

[joen]

There is not much to do besides look around until your city has had a chance to grow and build military units (which is automatic at this point).  There is no tutorial yet, but it is near the top of my TODO list :-)

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[HeroesGraveDev]

I've tried playing your game but as far as I can see at the moment there's nothing to do except look at places on the map and zoom in/out. Is there a tutorial somewhere for this? Also, there should be tooltips for the little buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Maybe if you read the post properly:

Feel free to play with it - it's not necessary to create an account to look around in game, but is necessary if you'd like to have any cities to grow/attack from.

                                                                     

[tyeeeee1]

Maybe if you read the post properly:

I made an account before I wrote the post.

[joen]

It's been a while since I updated this thread, but I've added some more features into the game, notably:

Trade

Players and NPCs can now trade with each other for resources that they have collected.  This combined with the rarity of a few resource like tin and copper ore can make for interesting trade dynamics on a continent wide scale, quite similar to the copper and tin trade in the Bronze Age



City Details

It's now possible to look at the details of both your own cities and those of other leaders, including city resources, how the city allocates its budget, and the distribution of languages and religions.



Leader Traits

The ability to modify the traits of your leader have been added.  Not all of them currently have a function in game, but some have a profound impact, especially "City Growth" which mostly switchs between concentrating on population growth and concentrating on other resources (such as building up a military).



Unicode

Since most historical civilizations did not use the Roman alphabet, I wanted to be able to use names for leaders and cities that used the correct historical script if available.  I was surprised at how easy it was to get unicode support working, both in swing and worldwind (which uses jogl under the covers).  The only hiccups I encountered were that the mysql jdbc driver that I'm using needed an extra parameter to support unicode communication between the mysql server and the game server, and the fonts used for display in game needed to support unicode characters.

In the image below, I have a city named 许昌 (Xuchang) ruled by 曹操 (Cao Cao) of fame from China's Three Kingdoms period.  Unfortunately, I was not able to find a unicode script for ancient Mongolian for Genghis Khan  

[sproingie]

For some reason, the city named "Oo-skroingj" appeals to me

[joen]

I use a pseudo random number generator along with English phonology rules to create names that are pronounceable (sometimes with a lot of work) to an English speaker, but are otherwise gibberish.  If you want a laugh, try to pronounce some of the names from http://holocene.co/leader_hiscores.xhtml out loud, preferably in the presence of a girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/parent.

Here are some that I liked:
Spoo-shoo
Dweelk
Swirl
Wuhsh
Uts
Shroilng
Pij
Spwoorb

[sproingie]

There used to be a great word generator out there called Yould but the link appears to be dead now.  The source for it (python) is available on PyPi though.