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This is a pretty amusing solution. Do you think it'll actually behave in the same chaotic way as game of life even though it's not on a flat grid? Have you tried running a simulation?
If I was doing something like this I'd probably just randomly roll for PK areas; which would make it trivial to change the ratio of PK:noPK areas. At the cost of removing the possibility of a bunch of gamers coming together to do math trying to manipulate the game space.
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The rules are the mostly the same. The definition of cells is different. The rule that player concentration would trigger an active cell is different. It would behave similarly on the overworld depending on where people congregate (i.e. there would likely be a number of more persistent on cells). I haven't actually done a simulation of Conway's Game of Life with persistent cells. I can say that inside levels without many people in them would mostly stay noPK because they mostly have only one neighbor. Inside levels with a lot of players would likely trend their respective outside levels to be PK areas.
I've supplied a Javascript function (below) I wrote to emulate Conway's Game of Life (on a grid) a while back if anyone's interested. I've written a boundless version, too, but that's not really applicable to this scenario.
How to emulate:
- Provide a two dimensional JS array of map areas you'd expect to persistently have a high number of players.
- Get the result of the next generation by feeding it into the function.
- Overwrite the result to account for the persistently high population centers.
- Repeat from step 2.
PHP Code:
function nextGen(cells){
return cells.map(function (row, a) {
return row.map(function(alive, b) {
var ia, ib, neighbors = 0;
for (ia = -1; ia < 2; ia++) {
if (typeof cells[ia + a] == "undefined") continue;
for (ib = -1; ib < 2; ib++) {
if (typeof cells[ia + a][ib + b] == "undefined") continue;
if (ia || ib) neighbors += cells[ia + a][ib + b];
}
}
return (alive && neighbors == 2) || neighbors == 3 ? 1 : 0;
});
});
}
The real question is how this would shift player concentration over time due to PKing activity. I would expect once an area becomes a PK area, players will then distribute themselves among the closest noPK areas that don't have significant physical boundaries to the original area, but it would be hard to emulate because of those physical boundaries.