PC v1.x Developer Diary

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zztong said:
Perhaps a diversion, Kinyajuu added code to support this...

<township name="city">
<property name="outskirt_district" value="rural,residential"/>
</township>




... that is, where a township would pick between rural or residential to wrap around a city. I assume that is still a feature.

What I was curious about was if it might become a Tile by Tile randomization when wrapping rather than a one-time type of district randomization? In this way, the edge of a city might become a mix of both rural and residential tiles.
Is the same. I have not looked at that code. It may or may not change.

Got a couple clarification questions about these (because I am stupid), but more is just a general "do you mind/have the time to go a little more in-depth with what these do?"

Town planning: I assume that this means that the further you go from the center of a town, the more rural the area becomes (like what seems to be implemented in A21, but more refined). Does this also include making sure that tiles don't repeat too often? And in terms of tiles themselves, has there been any improvement to the fact that in some generated towns, there will be tiles that completely block off one half of a town from another? That's happened a few times... I generate a lot of maps lol

Township counts and sizes: What's a township in the context of the generator (sorry if that's been asked before) and does this mean we will see more varied towns than what we have?

Balanced Lakes/river, etc: Not quite a question about the balancing, but are there any plans now or in the future to add more stamps for the aformentioned items? Right now, it seems as if there's only one river stamp (at least only one that I end up getting!), two or three lake stamps, and maybe one or two craters and canyons. It's more difficult to tell that they repeat when you're in game and on the ground, but sometimes when you're flying in a Gyro or looking at the map previewer, it's very obvious.

Obviously these are a lot of questions so I don't expect you to answer them all, but if you can answer any of them (or anyone else can!) I would be very grateful! I know you are busy with finalizing A22 and such. Thanks, if you do end up answering even one!
Town planning changes involve more successfully making towns on the map. It failed a lot before due to excessive randomness and retrying the whole process instead of specific sections. The town tiles are the same layouts.

A township is a city, town, countrytown, oldwest or roadside type of location made up of a random range of tiles and these change based on world size.

Yes, we want better and more stamp variety, but there is no timeline for when that might happen.

What about having the default shape for towns something circular rather than rectangular?
Towns don't have a shape. I think they just grow in random directions, but I have not looked at that code, but plan to as I improve the systems.

 
Some towns follow the flow of the land: built on the flat as it meanders a short distance through hills.

Would be interesting to see in-game.

I wonder if town/city tiles could be designed to only be placed on flat terrain, non-clumped? String-fashion rather than blobbed. I believe the game now selects a flat area for town/city tiles and even flattens an area if too many hills and mountains are packed into the map. That might satisfy players wanting no towns: they simply then select all hills and mountains.
Towns flatten terrain, except for mountains. Terrain is generated first, so the more mountains, the less success towns have in generating and you would get less. I reduced mountain max scale a bit and may reduce the default mountain percent. I recently removed mountains from wasteland to allow bigger cities there, but their success rate is not as good as I hoped, so needs more work to figure out why.

There was something in A21 where they said they were adding hills and mountains after towns to fill in gaps.  Not sure if they do it both before and after and not sure the exact details.  I just remember seeing that.  But if they place towns first, that explains the towns not being a variety of shapes as it meanders around hold and mountains.
I don't think anything is adding them after. Cities/towns use up the space pretty well now.

Chaton Noir said:
Hello, @faatal! Will the new Grace model have a jiggle physics for the bloody... drool hanging from the mouth, fur on the back and hanging intestines?
Maybe. Artists add those, not me.

 
@faatal You mentioned trader biome restrictions in a previous post and it maybe being tied to story progression in the future. But what exactly is happening in A22?

Are specific traders only going to appear in specific biomes for every map? (Example: Jen always in wasteland)

or is it more random like for each map you generate it decides which traders go in which biomes. I hope that makes some sort of sense (Example: One map Jen might only be in wasteland but another map Jen will only be in the desert etc)

 
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@faatal You mentioned trader biome restrictions in a previous post and it maybe being tied to story progression in the future. But what exactly is happening in A22?

Are specific traders only going to appear in specific biomes for every map? (Example: Jen always in wasteland)

or is it more random like for each map you generate it decides which traders go in which biomes. I hope that makes some sort of sense (Example: One map Jen might only be in wasteland but another map Jen will only be in the desert etc)
Yes, specific traders appear in specific biomes in A22, but this could change as we test and iterate on the design.

 
good question. there is a mention of if a job is chained to previous jobs , or its hinted at because there is a "chained reward: none " at the bottom right when you open a quest.

 
@faatal Question regarding RWG, is there or could there be an option to determine the min/max distance that wilderness POI's can spawn apart from each other?
Reason I ask is I'd like a way through xml to have wilderness POI's spawn about 200m-250m apart from each other, as well as the potential to have close to 1000 wilderness POI's in an 8k map, and even more if people dare to generate a 16k map.

(Think of it like a nomadic playstyle, constantly moving around the map)

 
So when you were talking about remenat shopping plazas@Laz Man

Are they like ruins, ravaged and broken down or Just another set of plazas 

And how do they improve performance.  Do you merge them together? Like zoes nails and Vick Garsons 

 
So when you were talking about remenat shopping plazas@Laz Man

Are they like ruins, ravaged and broken down or Just another set of plazas 

And how do they improve performance.  Do you merge them together? Like zoes nails and Vick Garsons 


Remnants are often referred to as non-questable POIs.  They are great free form exploration locations and often are designed with the mindset that they can be taken over and retrofitted into player bases.  Coincidently, they are more performant than questable POIs (e.g. less vert / tris).

 
Wild news, though kinda feels more like a "rebranding" of the term Alpha than anything

At least not long to wait for A22 1.0

 
Does the impending release of 1.0 this mean that TFP has worked out the optimization challenges?
I love this game, but performance has always been something that we excused as being something that would be addressed when it was time to leave alpha.

 
I'm glad we got a roadmap and 1.0 stuff, but I can't help but feel like it's a bit too soon? I thought the stuff was a roadmap to gold, not so much a post gold update cycle, but I guess thats pretty much the same thing. There's still a lot that's being/needing to be updated, so to me this almost feels like their releasing out of ea to help with a22 hype? That's probably not the case, but it feels like it a bit. Just considering how much stuff for the pre gold roadmap isn't in 1.0, I don't know. Just sort of confusing considering the previous roadmap? Could be wrong. I noticed outfit dlcs coming in the q4 2024 update. I don't really like that at all honestly, maybe I'm the only one. Not a fan of dlcs like that in general, but imo would be best to wait until all of the roadmap stuff is done before adding paid dlc, if they felt like it needed to be in the game. Having outfits locked behind dlc feels a bit bad to me, I just applaud games that don't have that kind of stuff.

I'm just a bit confused. Feels like this should be a road to 1.0 instead of a post 1.0 cycle, but I'm sure coming out of early access will generate a lot of attention. Does definitely feel too early for a price hike honestly though, espescially given how a22 isn't a particularily major release compared to the future patches purely based on the features that will be implemented. (outside of the console release) Looks like we're waiting another year for bandits.

 
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