moyer@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Eric Moyer) (11/20/90)
Greetings all! After a gillion hours of SimEarth, I have a few observations
and questions to put forth...
TIMESCALE MODELS :
The Gelogic timescale phase of the game evaluates planet temperature
much differently than the other phases. Try this... Turn off the core
heat all the way, turn meteors & volcanos all the way up, turn off the
solar input and greenhouse effect, turn up all albedos, and start
manually pummeling the planet with meteors. You will find that despite
a high dust content in the atmosphere & NO SUN, the surface temperature
in some places doesn't even fall below zero, and life WILL form. If you
look at the air temperature map, it will be obvious that the simulation
is slapping down some fixed temperature bands without actually calculating
the temperatures at each location.
As you enter the evolutionary timescale, the simulation begins to compute
temperatures for real, and the oceans will freeze almost immediately,
causing all life to die out, which subsequently kicks you back into the
geological timescale. Surprise, surprise, the planet heats back up again
when you enter the geological timescale.
MUSINGS - Now I know that for most purposes the abscence of temp
calculations in the gelological time phase doesn't really affect much,
but it amuses me that in a universe of cold dead planets, it's so
difficult to create a freezing dead ice planet in SimEarth. I don't
really mean to pick on the game. If the difficulty of forming life was
anywehere near the actual figure, nobody would EVER be able to do it.
MARS TEMPERATURES & OXYGEN :
Has anyone else found that the colors on the air temperature map don't
correspond to the actual planet temperatures? When you use the magnifying
glass tool in the edit window, the temerature at that location is displayed
in the info window. This temperature is consistently lower than the air
temp map says it is during the mars scenario. Is the color coding wrong
on the map, or the temperature wrong on the planet, or is the air temp
that much different from the surface temp? If the ground temp is correct,
then why is it that (1) I can't heat it above zero anywhere (2) Things will
live & thrive in the sub zero without difficulty (3) the planet report
gives me a great big smily for viability?
Also, is there anything other than organisms & fire which consumes O2?
I assume that organisms consume oxygen, though it isn't depicted on the
flowchart. I often have problems during the MARS scenario with too much
oxygen in the air. I have tried to limit my biome production, but I
don't quite have the hang of controlling the oxygen levels yet.
UNFORTUNATE GERNERALIZATIONS:
The habitat specifications are made my class, with no exceptions for
specific species. As a programmer I can well understand the necessity of
this generalization, but as the ruler of my SimEarth planets, I am sadly
unable to fill my arctic regions with penguins.
MOLLUSKS, EVOLUTION, and THE REAL WORLD (ohhh, what's that?)
Last night I had squid for dinner and was amazed to see the "skeleton"
they posess. If you want to get a neat look at the evolution from external
skeletons to internal skeletons with backbones, go buy a squid from your
local seafood market (shouldn't cost you more than 15 cents for a little
6 or seven incher). Inside you'll find a single piece skeleton which slips
out easily through the top of the head. It looks kind of like a transparent
feather, except that there are no fibrous extentions, just two sheets of
"plasticky" material extending down each side of a thick stalk. I would
guess that this stalk eventually became the backbone in fish. Then again,
I could be wrong. I haven't looked it up anywhere to check yet.
TRICHORDS LIVE!
I think they're real neet, and a planet of sentient ruling trichords just
makes my day. I wonder how they walk upright while holding that spear,
anyway?
HOW TO GET ROBOTS TO EVOLVE:
I don't really know, I'm just playing with you. Now that I've started
babling on the subject, however, someone said they show up on the report
window. Where on the report window do they appear?
THE TRUTH BEHIND THE LIFE CLASS GRAPH:
What's the deal with this thing? Why doesn't it display my ruling
sentient class at all? I can't find any good answer in the manual. The
report screen may say that there's millions of trichords ruling, yet
their mini-icon doesn't even show in the class graph. What gives?
KUDOS:
SimEarth & Falcon are the two best mac games ever made. I only pick on
SimEarth in an effort to understand its guts. If you don't own it, stop
eating lunches & buy it with the money you save!
CETACEANS:
They're darn cute! I love the whales.
/-------------------------/----- You are a fluke of the universe. ---------/
/ Eric P. Moyer ;-o / You have no right to be here. /
/ moyer@brahms.udel.edu / Whether you can hear it or not, /
/-------------------------/--- The universe is laughing behind your back. -/
hirai@cs.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai) (11/21/90)
I once tried to make a 'Dune' like world and actually succeeded in having the sentient folks take off into Exodus a lot faster than on the usual Earth like planets. What I did: Once life appears and you're almost ready to go sentient, boil away the seas. Do this by turning up the sun, turning up the greenhouse effect, putting albedo low, etc. Once the oceans are gone, immediately put things back to normal except that you still want the sun to be high. I don't know what the underlying assumptions are but a waterless world seems to get cold with normal Earth-like model settings. You may need to tweak the other settings to keep the planet warm. You also want to keep the reproduction rate and heat tolerance at max. Don't worry, life won't die out at >50 degrees. Now that you have all the land mass that you'd ever want, your sentient folks can build cities all over the place and with the population expansion at max, the amount of work done will increase dramatically. Don't worry about plagues and war because the population will increase so much that plagues won't be able to slow down the expansion. Soon right after, you've achieved Exodus because all the work gone into Science (among other things). It seems like the lack of landspace is the limiting factor in most pre-Exodus scenarios and so taking that limit away makes the game easier. I have no clue as to whether having a sealess world is actually a viable thing in real-life. I'm beginning to think that SimCity is a nicer game since you actually get to 'put' things on the map instead of mainly tweaking stuff and having the computer 'put' most of the stuff on the map in SimEarth. I mean, wouldn't you rather 'build' than just 'watch'? -- Eiji Hirai @ Mathematics Dept., Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397 hirai@cs.swarthmore.edu hirai@swarthmr.bitnet rutgers!hirai%cs.swarthmore.edu Copyright 1990 by Eiji Hirai. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reproduce or quote explicitly denied except on Usenet. I don't speak for Swarthmore College.