game.core

The shared vocabulary of THE CITY REMEMBERS. Every build slice reads it; no slice writes it.

It answers the questions five agents building at once would otherwise each answer differently: where the districts are, how big a block is, what the clock says, what a reputation score is worth, how much heat is a star, which colours the references were drawn in, and the names of the scene entities each slice attaches its component to.

It holds no behaviour. Rules live here (a pure function from position to district, from score to band, from heat to stars); systems live in the slices.

What is in it

Functions

local Core = require("game.core")

Core.districtAt(x, z)        -- -> "oldTown"      the district a world position is in
Core.districtName("oldTown") -- -> "Old Town"
Core.cellOf(x, z)            -- -> i, j           the grid cell a position falls in
Core.blockCentre(i, j)       -- -> x, z           world centre of a cell
Core.clockOf(elapsed)        -- -> { day, label, phase, ... }
Core.dayStamp(5)             -- -> "DAY 5"
Core.reputationLabel(70)     -- -> { label = "RESPECTED", colour = "teal" }
Core.wantedStars(140)        -- -> 3
Core.rankName(500)           -- -> "SOMEBODY"
Core.memoryShape()           -- -> the shape one stored memory has

The mounts

A slice attaches its component to its own mount and to no other one. The mounts are entities the scene build places; adding a component to one is an entityOps.addComponents call and does not involve writing the scene file.

mount_city     the city's geometry and atmosphere
mount_life     pedestrians, traffic, the police
mount_memory   the memory ledger and reputation
mount_player   the player, vehicles, the arrival
mount_ui       every screen
mount_world    weather and ambience

The memory contract

game.core defines what a memory is; game.memory (the memory slice) is what stores one. Any slice that wants the city to remember something calls:

require("game.memory").record({
    kind = "helped",
    district = Core.districtAt(x, z),
    subject = npcId,
    subjectName = "the man from the alley",
    text = "Helped a stranger out of a bad alley.",
    x = x, z = z,
})

and the memory slice dates it, weights it, files it, moves that district's reputation, gives it to whoever saw it, and draws it in the ledger.