One important focus is in the world generation. The final goal is to be able to have worlds with 10000 - 100000 NPCs. Each NPC will have generated relationships, professions and perhaps some special attributes.
Using the graphics engine it is possible to make a map editor. The map editor also supports editing objects that can have different states with different graphics. Also animations can be edited. Sounds can be associated to animations. Good 2D graphics for making games can be found from for example WorldForge project.
Most difficult part of the world generation is generating the societies and relationships of the persons. This all is be handled by Hissim. Another part of the world generation is handled by Towngen. It determines the places of the buildings in towns and generates roads and objects. Finally the output of the town generator can be converted to a format that the graphics engine understands.
Currently history simulation and town generation work. There are several features that needs to be added to town generator, like generating better road networks and adding things like rivers and lakes. The graphics engine and map editor also work, but editing animations and states is not easy enough. The generated maps can be converted to the new Atlas map format, but because there is no standard format for 2D graphics yet, the graphics cannot be converted.
The scripting system works, but the game engine only has few features currently: it's possible to move around and pickup some items. It's also possible to talk to NPCs, but they can currently only answer questions about who are their relatives and where do people work or live at. The questions are parsed using a simple natural language parser.
All the parts of Kokatrix can be configured and used within a graphical user interface. It is for example possible to incrementally update a town map between Hissim simulations.
Last modified: Sunday, May 9, 2004