DEV Community

Cover image for The Logistician System - A new series of fixes launching soon for Emstrata
Nick Goldstein
Nick Goldstein

Posted on

The Logistician System - A new series of fixes launching soon for Emstrata

Most of the time on Emstrata, continuity is solved. There's still a couple hiccups and types of stories that it seems to struggle with (and I'm working on ironing those out too). A couple patterns keep popping up, from my experience:

The map doesn't keep up to the reality of the simulation if you move around a lot or go far distances within a turn. Overall, the map tends to lag and this can cause location-based issues in later turns.

Sometimes the simulation takes a left turn and there's not an obvious mechanism to unravel the correct, but directionally wrong storyline (you can technically protest it, but that's not obvious and doesn't give you any interesting ideas to play with).

Sometimes you may forget what has happened in a sim that you're revisiting after a long period of time or you're just interested and tracking the old lore of your sim and there's no current method to do that.

You want to interact with an artifact but don't want to spend a turn doing something so minor.

Anyway, I laid out these pain-points to get to the crux of what the Logistician is built to fix. Essentially, the Logistician is an AI scanner that looks at the last few turns and sees if it needs any fixes (mostly along the lines of the pain-points that I just laid out). Maybe the narrative is deteriorating into insanity before your eyes and you're worried it's unrecoverable because how much random shit is being tossed in there all at once, or maybe you're still at the starting coordinate on the map, when you should be halfway across the world and you keep having to protest sentences that mention your current location incorrectly. For the first issue, the Logistician would kick the request to our new Director system which will generate three fundamentally different directions to take this turn in, if selected, the turn will rewrite with the new developments. For the latter issue, the Logistician kicks to the new Cartographer system and that would move you and any other poorly positioned entities to their appropriate spots on the map when the other systems fall short.

The new Ghost Writer system will pick up any manuscripts, conversations, letters, voicemails, etc. that should be readable or listenable from within the simulation, but were only summarized or represented by a short excerpt in the actual writing. Like someone mentions a letter that mentions that "David is the killer." Well, in theory, that letter is readable. It should exist, why can't I just click into it and read it? This is ultimately what the Ghost Writer system does when the Logistician contacts it.

All the while, the Logistician is itself compiling a log of 'deep memories'. These are event logs of the system that are not actively tracked or factored into turn-by-turn participation. You'll be able to manually remind the Emstrata of something from the past with these if the system is being daft or just pull it up and check it out, or remind yourself what has happened. It's also great to just take a glance over there to see all the progress you've made.

Now, I do want to stress that this is in progress, but I wanted to let the community know what's being built out right now.

Thoughts?

Top comments (0)

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.