11 KiB
OTIVM — Roadmap
otium · Latin: leisure, rest, creative withdrawal. The condition under which civilisation advances.
1. Vision
OTIVM is a browser-based idle game with a Classical Roman motif. One screen. One merchant. One ledger. You dispatch galleys, trade goods, and rest — and the world slowly reveals itself through what you carry and where you have been. Beneath the Roman surface lies eight thousand years of physical and human geography, encoded at H3 resolution and traceable to citable academic sources. The game is light-hearted. The substrate is not.
2. Player experience arc
OTIVM-I — The Ledger
One merchant. One resource loop. Five routes.
You are a Roman merchant in Ostia with fifty denarii and a battered ledger. You dispatch galleys on trade routes, wait for them to return, and rest when the work is done. Rest builds auctoritas — the reputation that opens what comes next. The journey unfolds through the goods you trade and the journal entries they unlock. The narrative voice is that of the merchant himself: observant, dry, occasionally surprised by what he finds at the end of a long road.
Five chapters: Ostia → Capua → Brundisium → Carthago → Alexandria.
The game saves per player. Up to 128 concurrent players share one server.
OTIVM-II — The Map
The Mediterranean becomes visible.
The five waypoints become real places on a rendered map. Routes are drawn on it. Distance is meaningful. You can see where your galley is. The map uses H3 hexagonal geometry — the same grid that underlies TESSERA, the physical world model that will power everything that follows. At this resolution the hexes are invisible to the player. They are infrastructure.
OTIVM-III — The Factor
You hire your first agent.
A factor appears — an NPC with a name, a journal voice, and a personality. He can run a route while you run another. He can also fail: fall ill, be robbed, make a bad deal. Managing him is different from managing a galley. He has opinions. This is the first Constructor — the character model inherited from the CIVICVS Mesolithic Simulator, now running in the Roman world.
OTIVM-IV — The Seasons
Real time enters the game.
Dispatches take real hours. Weather affects routes — the sea crossing to Carthago closes in winter storms, mountain passes slow in autumn. Weather data feeds from DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst), the same source used by the CIVICVS Simulator, delayed six hours from actual Berlin atmospheric conditions and projected onto the Roman world. The preparation window model from the Simulator appears here in simplified form: the game pre-renders the next session's conditions during downtime.
OTIVM-V — Provenance
Goods acquire a past.
The amber your merchant trades did not originate in a warehouse. It came from a specific place — a forested coastline, a river mouth, a trading post. That place has H3 coordinates. Those coordinates have TESSERA data: elevation, terrain class, hydrology, and occupation evidence from the Mesolithic cultures that preceded the Roman world by six thousand years. The player does not see the data directly. They see the merchant's journal entry about a strange bead that feels old in a way coins do not. The depth is real. The atmosphere is earned.
OTIVM-VI — The City
Waypoints become places.
Ostia has a harbour, a market, and a tavern. Each has a function. Prices fluctuate. Rumours move through the tavern before they move through the market. The harbour has ship availability. Each city's physical character — its elevation, its proximity to water, its terrain — comes from TESSERA H9 cell data. A port city built on low coastal terrain behaves differently from a hill town on limestone.
OTIVM-VII — The Atlas
The map opens.
The Mediterranean expands. New routes appear beyond the five original chapters. The map renders using H3 geometry at a resolution where the hexes become visible — a honeycomb of the known world, each cell carrying physical data from TESSERA. Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator exports are used as a projection reference layer for political geography and named territories, mapped onto the TESSERA physical substrate. The player sees a living atlas. The developer sees a queryable spatial database.
OTIVM-VIII — The Deep Past
The Mesolithic world surfaces.
Goods that originate in the far north carry traces of the cultures that first moved them. The amber road, the flint from the Pyrenean foothills, the ochre from ridge deposits — each traceable through TESSERA's occupation evidence layer (byte 7, OCC_FLAG) to one of the four launch Mesolithic cultures: Maglemosian, Ertebølle, Sauveterrian, Azilian. The Roman merchant does not know what Mesolithic means. He knows the amber is old. The player can look it up. The data is citable.
OTIVM-IX — Convergence
OTIVM and CIVICVS share a world.
A participant in the CIVICVS Mesolithic Simulator — running in 8000 BCE — performs an action that produces a good. That good enters the trade network. Thousands of years later, a Roman merchant in OTIVM carries something whose origin is traceable to a specific simulated human action in the Mesolithic. The two systems share the TESSERA substrate. The data warehouse connects them. This is not a gimmick. It is the architectural consequence of building both systems on the same physical reality layer from the start.
OTIVM-X — The Platform
OTIVM becomes infrastructure.
The game is now a public-facing interface to the CIVICVS platform. Any world that can be encoded as H3 cells and TESSERA data can be surfaced through OTIVM's rendering layer. The Roman world was chosen first because it is familiar and navigable. It is not the only world.
3. Technology convergence arc
The physical substrate — TESSERA
TESSERA is a globally consistent, immutable, academically grounded encoding of Earth's physical surface as H3 hexagonal cells. Each cell carries an 8-byte record:
| Byte | Field | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 0–1 | Elevation | GEBCO 2025 |
| 2 | Terrain class | ESA WorldCover 2021 v200 |
| 3 | Hydrology | HydroSHEDS v1.1 |
| 4 | Geology flag | BGR IGME5000 |
| 5 | Geology deposit | USGS MRDS |
| 6–7 | Occupation evidence | RFC-TESSERA-3.0-OCC-001 |
Every field value is traceable to a named, versioned, citable source dataset. Every tile, once generated, is content-addressed by its SHA-256 hash. The global pipeline covers the interaction sphere 15N–72N, 15W–75E: 8,591,961 H7 tiles, 421,006,081 H9 cells, zero errors across all completed stages.
H9 resolution (~180m) is the primary data resolution. H7 is the tile unit. H3's hierarchical structure means any OTIVM location encoded as an H3 ID at any resolution can be mapped to its TESSERA physical properties without coordinate transformation.
The simulation layer — CIVICVS
CIVICVS is a Mesolithic narrative simulator set in ~8000 BCE, Spree-Havel valley, Berlin (52.5°N, 13.4°E). It runs on TESSERA's physical substrate. Real Berlin weather data from DWD, delayed 6–12 hours, drives atmospheric conditions. Characters (Constructors) have knowledge, relationships, and skills gated by corpus chunks embedded as vectors in ChromaDB. The corpus is academically grounded in Maglemosian, Ertebølle, Sauveterrian, and Azilian material culture.
CIVICVS establishes the session model, the Constructor model, and the weather integration that OTIVM will inherit in releases IV and IX.
The game layer — OTIVM
OTIVM sits above CIVICVS in the same stack. It uses the same H3 grid, the same physical substrate, and will share the same weather source. It differs in period (Roman, ~14 BCE), tone (light-hearted, public-facing), and access model (browser-based, up to 128 concurrent players, no scheduling required).
The convergence point is the data warehouse: a shared layer where TESSERA cells, CIVICVS simulation events, and OTIVM trade provenance can be queried together across ten thousand years of the same physical geography.
The Azgaar bridge
Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator produces GeoJSON and SVG exports of political geography: territories, named regions, trade routes, cultural boundaries. These are projection references — they encode human geography onto physical terrain. The bridge layer maps Azgaar polygon centroids to H3 cells via point-in-polygon, then queries TESSERA for each cell's physical properties. Azgaar provides the political surface. TESSERA provides the physical truth beneath it. The bridge is planned for OTIVM-VII.
4. What exists today
These are verifiable claims about what is built and running as of April 2026.
TESSERA global pipeline: Stages 00–04 complete. Elevation, terrain, hydrology, geology flag, and geology deposit encoded for 8,591,961 H7 tiles. Stage 05 (geology assembly) written, verified, awaiting run instruction. Stage 06 (culture sampling, four Mesolithic cultures) not yet written. Global SpatiaLite database assembling on Dell pipeline node.
TESSERA v3.0 scoped dataset: Not yet assembled. Depends on stages 05 and 06. Target: four-culture bounding box, <10 GB, fits Proliant local-lvm.
TESSERA API: Code exists. Not yet deployed to production container.
CIVICVS Simulator: Shell API operational. Corpus in ChromaDB. Map and Scene containers in development. Real weather integration specified, not yet running continuously.
OTIVM: Container provisioned on srv-a (LXC 1105, otivm-dev). React 19 + Vite frontend scaffold committed. PM2 serving built output on port 3000. Nginx on wg-pk proxying otium.civicus.us. SSL active. Game code: not yet written.
5. Design principles — do not violate
- H3 from day one. Every location in OTIVM is an H3 cell ID. Never a coordinate pair, never a string name alone. This enables TESSERA queries at any future release without data migration.
- One screen, one loop. OTIVM-I ships when the core loop is fun. Complexity is added in named releases, not incrementally bolted on.
- Physical reality only in the data layer. TESSERA encodes what is physically true. OTIVM encodes what the merchant knows. These are separate layers and must never be conflated.
- No vaporware in public documentation. Section 4 of this document is the template. Every public claim is either running, committed, or explicitly marked as planned.- The data warehouse is the product. The game is the public interface. The substrate is the value.- Real weather only. DWD data always. No simulated weather.- JSON flat files for local state. No database on the OTIVM container. Save files are per-player JSON. A shared database is a future convergence-layer problem.- BSD 2-Clause license. The code is open. The data pipeline methodology is open. Academic scrutiny is welcome.---OTIVM is part of TheRON — The Residential Owner-operated Network. Single contributor: project owner. AI assistants implement, document, flag — do not direct.