Half-Earth Socialism

The project consists of two artifacts:

• The Half-Earth Socialism game (both web browser and standalone app versions).
• The Half-Earth Socialism editor (both web browser and standalone app).

This video walks through an example of how to use the editor.

Overview

• hes-engine defines the model that drives the game.
• hes-game is the game itself, which is mostly a visual layer over the engine.
• hes-editor is an editor to change parts of the game/engine, e.g. what projects are available, their parameters, etc, and is used to build custom .world files that can be loaded into new games.

We also include a version of the Hector simple climate model that we've adapted to run in the browser. The process of building Hector for WASM is complicated so pre-compiled versions are included here.

Setup

git submodule init
git submodule update

Dependencies

# Leptos is the main framework used for both the game and the editor.
cargo install trunk
cargo install cargo-leptos

# WASM target is required for frontend code.
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

Development

There is some functionality which is better kept in JS rather than ported to Rust/WASM. In particular, the rendering of the globe (which depends on three.js), handling of audio, and interfacing with the Hector WASM module. We'd use our Rust adapter for Hector directly but Rust/WASM doesn't work with C++ FFI, so we have to stick with using JS as a bridge.

The globe and Hector JS modules need to re-built if any of their files are edited. They can be rebuilt by doing:

1. cd hes-game/public/js
2. If you haven't already, run just setup.
3. Then run just build.

If debugging the game there are a few options you can pass as URL parameters which can help. These are used a comma-separated following debug=, e.g. http://localhost:3000/?debug=all-projects,all-processes.

• check-events: Show a list of all events and updates and click on them to trigger them.
• all-projects: All projects are unlocked at the start.
• all-processes: All processes are unlocked at the start.
• skip-to-planning: Skip the intro and just go to the planning phase.
• skip-tutorial: Skip the tutorial.
• skip-events: Skip all events.
• fast-years: Speed up years in the world events phase.
• always-skip-world: Skip the world events phase.
• i-am-the-state: Start with 1000 political capital.

Running

You can use just to run most tasks:

Available recipes:
    game        # Run development game (browser)
    editor      # Run development editor (browser)
    build       # Build the web release versions (browser)
    test        # Run tests
    translate   # Extract translation strings and update the translation mappings from the source CSVs.
    surfaces    # Generate biome surface textures and regional climates.
    sharing     # Generate sharing images.

Building & Deploying

• Cross-platform builds are handled by Github Actions (using a workflow_dispatch, i.e. manual trigger).
• The web versions of the game and editor are built using just build and are hosted as static sites.

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Releases

You can play it at:

• half.earth (web; and the editor)
• Steam (Windows/macOS/Linux) (Account needed)
  • Note: The build process for the Steam version is more complicated so it's less likely to be up-to-date.
• Itch.io (Windows/macOS/Linux)

Community

We have a Discord for the game and book here.