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New instance, new #introduction

I messed around with a lot of old Maxis games as a kid and kind of expected more would come out that would teach me how the world "really worked" in a way I could use to decide how to live my life. I still don't know what that would be like, exactly, but I figure *somebody* does, so I'm making a tool to help them, whoever they are: the Life Simulator Engine, #LiSE, pronounced "lies".

The core feature is time travel. The development kit for Inform 7 had this, and it seemed so obviously useful that I needed to have it. This replaces save files; now, everything that ever happened in any playthrough of your game lives in a database.

There's also a rules engine, similar to the one in Ren'Py's Dating Sim Engine. By compartmentalizing the complexity of your game's rules, it should make them easier to reason about, and there's a way to time travel to just before or after any particular rule, to see if it did the right thing.

Take a look:

https://vimeo.com/815795673
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
@clayote I relate with the idea that simulations could teach me about the real world. At some point I wanted to create a geopolitical simulation game to figure out what would happen to a communist country that wouldn’t be systematically economically and militarily pressured by the USA.

It didn’t go anywhere and I’ve since learned enough about the world to resign to the fact that it can’t be explained with simulations.
@hypolite It really depends on your standards for what constitutes an explanation

All of our climate models are wrong, but some are useful
@hypolite Something like Green New Deal Simulator https://www.molleindustria.org/blog/green-new-deal-simulator-release-notes/ isn't terribly useful if you're trying to actually predict what the results of specific policies would be, but if the idea is just to understand what the options *are*, and how they relate to one another, it could help