P-0: Virtual World Concept: Update 14: User Variables Part 2

I have now implemented and tested almost all of the main user variables. These include:

Endurance (walking, running, and physical activity will be influenced by this. Endurance can be restored by sleeping  and eating well, and by resting (reducing physical activity).
Stamina (This is closely linked to endurance, but influences short term actions such as sprinting, lasting just minutes, while Endurance is a longer-term variable, influencing the users general state of exhaustion.
Water
Food (This refers only to the quantity of food eaten, not the quality)
Nutrition (This refers to the quality of food eaten, and the balance of nutrients and vitamins and minerals consumed).
Sleep
ActivityLevel (This refers to the amount of physical effort performed by the user, and affects endurance).
Homeostasis (Homeostasis is basically the bodies ability to regulate itself. At the moment, homeostasis is influenced only by the ambient temperature of the world, but in future this variable will be influenced by diet and other factors).

I don’t have a “health” variable, which may seem surprising, but I have instead broken this variable down into the other variables that I have modelled. There is also a “states” variable which ties into the action/effect system. States can include things like Exhaustion, Hypothermia, Bleeding, Broken leg, etc, and can be applied by either actions (falling, being injured) or by other variables (food dropping below a certain level).

I have also included “Morale” as a variable, but I haven’t decided how to implement this yet. Morale will represent the players psychological state, and modeling this in a game will be challenging.

The main problem now will be expanding these variables and tying them together in ever more complex ways. For example, currently, all variables are scaled in relation to a “max” value. For example, users can survive for 3 days with no water or 3 weeks with no food. The rest of the calculations are based on those values, this allows me model the intermittent changes to the variables caused by eating and drinking, and becoming hungry and thirsty. However, the amount of time someone can survive without food and water, or to put it another way, the amount of food and water someone needs to survive in a given period of time, is highly variable. It depends on the temperature, their level of physical exertion, the amount of sleep they are getting, etc. So, someone could survive three weeks without food if they were resting and drinking well, but if they are trying to run several miles a day, they will starve to death much faster. This is the next problem that I need to solve.

After this, the next goal will be to define all objects and object combinations in the database, and create the world build to place them. I can then work on the art assets for the game.