Planetfall
somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com342 points by milliams 2 days ago
342 points by milliams 2 days ago
The author Daniel Huffman's story is quite compelling and inspiring:
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/about/
The long version is even better:
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/on-salva...
Wow, his description of work-related depression really hits home for me. I wish I could find that spark that he found, but I'm afraid all of the passion was ground out of me years ago.
It is really a great story. A bunch of ideas ... maybe some will help ...
Embracing curiosity and exploration can be life-changing; embracing play, lifelong - it's a universal form of lifelong exploration among primates. Also, plenty of research supports exploration's powerful affect on aging minds (though I don't know your age) in many ways. And as a wonderful effect, you find new things that you love. And remember that part of exploration is dead ends and failures - if you aren't failing, you aren't trying.
Also, life changes take a bit of time, like turning a big ship - an accumulation of things need to change. Just beginning to head in that direction - changing the derivative of the derivative of your path, in geek terms - can change your outlook, give you direction and goals; you're embarked on a long journey.
There's no panacea. Life can still feel pointless at times. For me, at least, the trick is to recognize it's my emotions, to have compassion for them - life ain't easy - and to put my head down and just do the things I know are right. And when I come out of it, I feel proud of what I've done and in a better place to move forward. Always do things that leave you a little better off than when you started.
Good luck! I hope that helps!
This game was deeply important to me: it's the first time I remember explicitly recognizing different ideological and religious beliefs abstracted away from their particular human instantiations.
I absolutely loved the different factions and what they believed in. It always made me wonder what types of beliefs aliens would have, if they exist.
It was a great game.
The political system is really great; even though there are only four fields with four options each, it is wonderful that the options aren’t automatically correlated. If you want to have a free market police state, you can. I honestly think playing this game in childhood might get people to think about little bit more about what their politics actually mean (I mean we could also have read some books, but that’s impossible). It also gives just the right feeling for a sci-fi game, because authors love playing with weird political configurations.
I love sci-fi (and fantasy) for that reason (amongst others of course), even if nine times out of ten it's a variation on human cultures, or reduced down to a single dimension, at least early on - Elves are elitist racists, Klingons are angry, etc. But long running series can / will often add nuance over time, with the stereotypes fighting with their own "nature".
It is a shame that "Civilization: Beyond Earth" was such a disappointment. Instead of interesting leaders, factions, and ideologies, we got "Space Africa" and "Space Australia".
I wonder if there some legal issue preventing Firaxis from making a true Centauri remake.
I feel like Beyond Earth was a great game trying to break out of a mediocre one. I love the way the quest system forces you down a particular victory condition, the way you can bully other factions using fear rather than respect, and how the affinity system makes factions that truly feel different toward the end game. I hate how you can pick a quest pathway that you don't have the resources to follow (e.g. you might inadvertently pick a purity quest answer, but only have access to xenomass), how dumb the AI is at victory conditions, and how uninteresting the tech tree (er, I mean web) is.
Yes, there was. Electronic Arts owns the IP for Alpha Centauri and has stonewalled trying to do anything with it.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - what a game.
Through SMAC, I found ideas about how future societies might organize themselves to ensure human survival and progress. I found ideas about speculative technologies and how they could reshape civilization. I found that playing the game made me feel less alone, because it revealed loneliness as a universal human condition—timeless and unyielding. I found hope in a vision of humanity finding its place among the stars. I found myself grappling with ideas far larger than myself. I found my empathy measured by in-game choices. I found that history, like the game, carries no moral compass—it only moves forward.
To those wondering why "planetfall" for Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: it was a recurrent term in the game, the "start of history".
And the starting prompt was:
> $NAME3, a new era of struggle and opportunity awaits you. The UN Starship Unity has arrived in the Alpha Centauri system after a forty year voyage. All contact with Earth has been lost. After Captain Garland's assassination by an unknown assailant, the crew mutinied and split into factions. In the ensuing conflict, some seized control of the Unity's colony pods. You now shape the destiny of your $<M1:$FACTIONADJ0> faction, which has just made PLANETFALL!
>So, I went over the map and wrote down the elevation value of every tile. All 8,192 of them.
Surely there was a more automated solution than to do something 8k times manually?
I have no doubt that many people reading this comment section could extract the map data and write a script to translate it to a .CSV very quickly.
But there’s something to be said for a mindless, long-term repetitive project that you can chip away at when you feel like occupying yourself with something unimportant for a bit.
This made me briefly ponder the meaning of lives spent copying manuscripts or doing other repetitive tasks.
I get this satisfaction from mining big spaces in Minecraft, mindless but satisfying.
Unfortunately this specific activity in Minecraft very easily turns into an enormous time sink which unless I was really too tired to do anything else and sleeping wasn’t an option, I inevitably regret afterwards.
I thought the same. There are a ton of nerds (I count myself among them) who loved this game in its day and would happily take a crack at programmatically extracting these data points.
Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github. Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.
Looks like they've figured out the tile format. Haven't grokked the whole codebase, but this seems to be the code for parsing out the data: https://github.com/afwbkbc/glsmac/blob/55fc72047607425149164...
So yeah, someone technical with the map file and half an hour could probably have gotten him the full elevation specs.
Reading the description of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I realize the animation series "Scavengers Reign" has a very similar setting (human colonists crash land on a planet that seems to be sentient).
I'll use this opportunity to encourage people to watch this show. If you are a fan of sci-fi (think Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge), you will love this. If you are not, I think you should still give it a try. It is that good.
The sound design of this game was so good. Such a superb game.
I love the strange "event" sound, the little bleeps and bloops of the interface, the "pew-pews" of the weapons, and the fantastic voice acting. I've had this game installed on one computer or another since I bought it retail back in '99. It's a work of art. No other Civ game ever matched it for me, no matter how far graphics have come in the last 25+ years.
100% a masterpiece in every respect. I think they innovated the upgrade and piece together mechanic which was very cool and addictive.
I loved that system. One of my favorite techniques in the endgame was to attach a colony pod to a missile unit. You could then drop a city wherever you needed it behind enemy lines and get your injured units inside quickly.
The AI never could figure out how to deal with that strategy.
The one complaint about sound design is how the background music works. I think it starts playing when you’re not active, but on any given playthrough, it never gets a chance to trigger.
There are separate soundtracks for each faction, I think.
The work is great and i like the map and the writeup. Excellent work!
One shortcoming is that its land texture doesn't show any contrasty edges, everything smoothly flows into other regions. We see the mountains but the textures pretty much ignore them and the edges that we see in our planet's texture are missing.
I do kind of agree. One interesting feature of the original map, which makes it look so alien, are the lines of red that cut through everything. I guess it's the xenofungus, but it looks a bit like magma or something, like continents that are being broken apart. This is lost in the new version.
That said, I do appreciate the work that went into this, it looks very cool.
I had to give the disk for that game away in order to stop playing it. It was seriously interfering with work and sleep.
Along similar lines is "Here Dragons Abound", a blog about procedural generation of fantasy maps, though it hasn't been updated in awhile. https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
> there’s also an official, built-in map of the planet, carefully crafted
Is there a mathematical framework for how to optimize a map for gameplay to be most enjoyable?
I burned a heck of a lot of tokens on Claude Opus 4’s extended thoughts on this and the answer is most enjoyable!:
Taking this question seriously leads us into surprisingly rich territory! It's actually at the intersection of several fields that have been quietly revolutionizing game design.
The Alpha Centauri map works brilliantly because it balances several mathematical tensions:
* Resource distribution follows power laws that create natural chokepoints and valuable territories without being too predictable
* Distance metrics between faction starting positions that ensure interaction without immediate conflict
* Terrain connectivity that creates interesting path-finding problems and strategic depth
Here's where it gets really interesting:
Flow Theory Mathematics: Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow has been formalized into mathematical models. The ideal difficulty curve follows something like: `D(t) = S(t) + ε`, where difficulty matches skill level plus a small challenge margin. For maps, this translates to ensuring players always have meaningful decisions at their skill level.
Information Entropy: Good maps maintain optimal information entropy - not too random (chaos), not too ordered (boring). Researchers have found sweet spots around 0.3-0.5 on normalized entropy scales for terrain variation.
Graph Theory Applications: Maps are fundamentally graphs, and metrics like:
* Betweenness centrality (identifying crucial chokepoints)
* Clustering coefficients (how "clumpy" resources are)
* Shortest path distributions (travel time variance)
...all correlate with player engagement.
The Deeper Insight: What seems naive is actually profound - by taking "fun" seriously as an optimization target, we're forced to confront what makes human decision-making satisfying. The best mathematical frameworks don't try to define fun directly, but instead optimize for decision richness - the number of meaningful, non-obvious choices available at each game state.
This is why procedural generation in modern games increasingly uses these frameworks, creating maps that aren't just random but mathematically tuned for engagement.
Most of what it said is fitting math to heuristics - “don’t put starting points too close to each other” and “have some chokepoints so there’s some battles” and “give everyone equal access to resources”
The map was likely developed iteratively via playtesting - no need even for heuristics then. Just play & ask “is it fun?”
tbh i would have been more interested in your thoughts than some AI's.
Me too! I happened to learn a few new things / aspects from asking and I thought I’d toss this into a comment
I never played Alpha Centauri - I was more of a Master of Magic / Syndicate guy - but your writing about this project makes me wish I hadn't ignored it back in the day.
Pulling back, I want to say that as I get older and hopefully wiser, the number one quality in a person that draws me to them is their passion for deep cut niche interests, pursued without care of who is watching. Often in spite of who is watching.
I don't have any particular interest in cartography or typography, but watching people who are truly, deeply nerdy about a topic is one of the most pure joys. In some ways, it's actually better that I'm not into these things because it allows me to appreciate just how much you are.
When I'm choosing who to spend time around, I don't care if you're passionate about the same things as me. I strongly care that you're passionate about something.
^ this is me telling you I despise nihilists without telling you I despise nihilists. Except, well... sorry.
You owe it to yourself to give this a shot if you have the time. I find it less of a Civilization game, more a sci-fi horror novel presented with Civilization mechanics rather than paper, if that makes any sense at all.
Play on Civilian and comp-stomp the AI, that way you get to see all the Special Project videos which are really excellent. I really wish they let you see them if someone else gets there first.
It's one of the best science fiction stories I've experienced, along with The Last Question (very short) and Outer Wilds (which is some of the most profound 20 hours of solitude I've had).
I consider myself a nihilist in the sense of, don't worry about a "legacy", don't compare yourself to the rich and famous, because a blink in the timescale of the universe, it won't matter.
The only meaning an action has is in the smaller timescale then. The here and now, and a few years after.
Help the people around you, be curious, chase your interests, do cool things. Time is short and for you, it is the only time that matters.
I'm passionate about Cracks Call being the bane of an artificer build in MoM. An uncommon, unresistable, insta-kill spell (and it's in the same domain as Web, so flying doesn't help at all).
I somehow only this moment realized that this exists! https://www.slitherine.com/game/master-of-magic
My favourite build-out, which might have been somewhat nerfed in later updates, was to allocate all of my eggs in the Life basket so that you can start the game with Incarnation.
In my experience, Torin is a game over win condition.
I also only this moment realized that too.
Torin can be one-hit-killed with cracks-call as well, so nature wizards are annoying. He is the only one who you can get back with all XP though, since you can just cast incarnation again.
Halfling+lionheart+invulnerable is a very good early-game rush on the harder difficulties, as are phantom warriors.
Oh no! Just when I was finally getting it out of my system, there’s a remake! Cruel.
I wonder if you can still get units with negative numbers of figures in them when lionheart wears off. Maybe I need to buy it and find out.
The remake is terrible. It looks nice, but the AI is super dumb and it's not fun at all to play it.
Seconding the sentiment, this was a brilliant read that gave me a newfound appreciation for the art of cartography, but also for giving oneself over to a pursuit fully. Truly excellent.
If you like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, you owe it to yourself to read this deep dive into the philosophy behind it. https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/
they asked if I mapped real or fictional places
yes he does
Remarkable work of love. Thank you for sharing.
i had a nerdgasm
I mean I'm a giant smac fan but didn't realize the title referred to that. You gotta put that more up front, that game gets clicks. Anyways, time to read your article. Cheers!
What does this have to do with Planetfall? I expected to land on an online version of the game, but nope.
The map is from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a game from 25 years ago, a spinoff of the Civilization series, where a colony ship from Earth lands on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. In the game's narrative, the colonists use "planetfall" to refer to the landing event and date.
It may surprise Infocom fans [up to 10,000 of you] to learn that the word “planetfall” was coined/defined for space flight, even before the adventure game was written.
Hint: it’s a logical derivative of the seafaring term “landfall”.
Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...
Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.
I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?
I plan on making a video on zork. I'm sure there's others but it'll be a nice deep dive into a few infocom games. Gonna do one on Odell down under and MECC too.
There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...
Not just the classics, there is actually a thriving interactive fiction community producing new games regularly. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition usually gets 60-70 entries each year.
Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.
Save states and walkthroughts/faqs/hints can provide the help you need, although some people think these are cheating. I'm fine "cheating", though, as long as I'm "cheating myself" and not others.
I think a lot of players liked the insanely hard. A Mind Forever Voyaging was really well written but relatively easy—which is probably why I especially liked it. But I don’t believe it sold especially well.
Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).
But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.
I have incurable nostalgia for the genre (both graphical and pure text adventures) but it's hard to play them without a walkthrough nowadays. The games are simply not fun by modern standards. Their mere existence was a miracle back then and a lot of the excitement was related to interacting with the computer at all. I'd love to be able to recover this sense of wonder but I suspect that most of it was about discovering the world as a child.
I've been playing through every adventure ever made in chronological order, so you can watch me do it so you don't have to
just reached 1983 which has Planetfall
Turrican will be preserved like Infocom. But I fear they will all be forgotten in the depths of a digital computer history museum. I'd love with LLMs could really bring the excitement of text adventures back. It has been tried but so far it's still in the text version of the uncanny valley.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems.
Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?
I’ve never heard this term z-machines
Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.
Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.
I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?
For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.
I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.
The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.
Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.
Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.
I played thru zork and Zork zero not long ago.
Zork is great. Everything seemed to click into place at the end.
I had incredible memories of zork zero but wow, that shit is opaque. I unashamedly used a guide when I got stuck and it took forever still.
Was this "be clever" stuck, or "bad game design" stuck?
As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.
He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.
The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.
It's been 20 years since I played, but IIRC Zork Zero is probably worse than the median Sierra game for "bad game design" stuck. It's pretty bad.
Bad game design stuck. Some of the connections are so obtuse youd have to be a chess computer to see the item being relevant in that way later. And plenty of chances to bone yourself early in a playthru with no fixes(undo being an option lost 1000 turns ago). Frequent sequential saves help, but I feel there's a whole article ranking the friendliness of adventure text games and I'd rank it on the meaner side, haha. They got better at avoiding those situations in their future graphical adventures(but not totally, damn bonding plant in return to zork). Not to mention the map is so immense good luck finding where you dropped the hard hat or whatever.
If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.
So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
I think it’s probably also very tempting to just give up on a puzzle and just find the solution or at least a hint online. You pretty much couldn’t do that back in the day.
Most of these games had hint books ("invisiclues") and selling them was a big part of the business. Some companies actually sold more hint books than the games themselves due to piracy!
Yeah but those came later. I think Mike started those in biz school and later joined Infocom where he did (ran?) marketing. Even with BBSs there just wasn’t a lot of info out there unless you called one of the authors you knew :-)
To be clear, I thought the article was for this game, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall
Yeah, why is the article entitled "Planetfall," when it has no apparent relationship to the game?
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) was a very interesting title. It came about because Sid Meier lost his rights to the Civilization franchise for a period of time. Yet SMAC was considered the real successor to CivII rather than Civilization Call To Power because of the recognition and the genius of Sid Meier.
But SMAC was in its day quite divisive. Some Civ fans (self included) weren't able to get into the world with unfamiliar tech tree, obscure terrain features and the whole nomenclature of the game just being so... alien.
Now, granted it was likely the best sci-fi turn based title ever made but at the time us fans of Sid's work were really craving for a sequel to CivII and as a result SMAC received a somewhat lukewarm welcome. Likely undeservedly so.
For others who are more curious about Sid Meier's life in game design and development, the appropriately titled "Sid Meir's Memoir" (https://sidmeiersmemoir.com/) was an OK read that goes through everything from the founding of MicroProse, selling it to Atari, to founding Firaxis and a lot in-between.
I was disappointed that the book didn't have much to say about Alpha Centauri. I wish he would do a GDC postmortem for Alpha Centauri like he did for Civ 1.
I think in general the book isn't so much focus on the game design itself, sadly, but a lot of stuff around it.
However, is the whole "Back to the future" chapter basically about Alpha Centauri? Some time ago I read the book, but seems to be mentioned a bunch there: https://imgur.com/a/6d0U6oH
It’s the “Civ” game I probably most got into. Maybe because I was a bit ambivalent about earlier ones.
Cartography, check. Alpha Centauri game, check. Very cool.
On my list, Alpha Centauri easily makes it on top 5 games ever made.
Thank you for the trip to memory lane. <goes to GOG to download the game>
What else is on the list?
Well, since you asked, Arcanum, Colonization, Fallout 1, the original Pirates and, well, Caves of Qud (surprise).