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Stupid Ideas for Phantasmal

'Seed'-based building, a script-free build system

Imaging a builder system based on physical, manipulable objects, each extremely small and light. Call them seeds. Builders would be given unlimited access to seeds, which could be combined in nifty nested ways. They would also receive unlimited tissue-paper bags, which held any reasonable number of seeds, but did nothing else.

Each builder would be given a very limited quantity of Ethereal Water (or whatever it wound up being called). This Ethereal Water would contain both cycles of processor time and a certain number of quota units of seed-sprouting. The processor time would be enough that it would rarely be a problem except with the most script-heavy seeds.

This would have the advantage that large (external) objects would be created first since they would 'sprout' first before the Ethereal Water penetrated them to sprout everything inside. Infinite loops would be impossible because each builder would pour a limited amount of Ethereal Water at a time, so an infinite nesting would stop when the water was used up. The builder tools would be easy -- you simply manipulate objects and put them inside each other. Builders would need to be able to see (and travel?) inside seeds to make really complex structures, and would need very large containers of Ethereal Water, but that'd be okay. It'd be easy enough to make container seeds act as containers and room seeds be locations.

The primary advantage of seeds over, say, having the builder just create the objects directly is that the seeds can easily algorithmically generate slight variations on a theme. For instance, a desk seed might generate a few pens and paperclips, a stray notepad and a small bottle of port in one case, or an ornate fountain pen and a few stray books in another. This allows builders to easily use scripted objects with minimal complexity.