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Is anyone else annoyed by the meteor range


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Just want to clarify how meteor showers work:
Due to worldgen the number varies, but from what I can tell, the lowest number of meteor spawners in a standard world is 2, the very very very worst case is 14, though it's pretty uncommon, In general I would expect 4-7 meteor spawners.
Each meteor spawner has a radius of 15 tiles around its center, where it spawns meteors, or 30 tiles from edge to edge, due to how the spawning of meteor spawners is done, I would expect quite a large area of overlap between meteor spawners, so having 2 spawners in a world would probably feel like 1.5 spawners in terms of area coverage.

Any other behaviors, such as the impression of them moving or spawning, is likely due to a mod.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that as number of meteor spawners goes up, the total overlap between meteor spawners increases, to an extent more meteor spawners means more meteors in the same area, not new meteors in a different area (Though obviously the total area meteors can spawn in will be increased)

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32 minutes ago, zarklord_klei said:

Any other behaviors, such as the impression of them moving or spawning, is likely due to a mod.

This is most likely the incorrect take away from this. The take away as a dev should be "why do so many players come to this same (incorrect) conclusion about meteor fields moving and or growing?" Because this is an incredibly long standing and wide spread rumor in DST, I doubt an entire week goes by without me being asked about it 10+ times by viewers who are newer to the game. I don't think the math behind it is entirely the issue, but there are some tweaks that could be made to it to help the player see the maximum range sooner.

 

The math that the meteorshower component does, even with it's "fancy easing" to prevent most meteors from being clustered on the exact center, still leads to the vast majority of meteors landing 1/2 to 3/4ths of the radius away from the meteorspawners position. That means that the average player will not see a meteor land on it's maximum distance away from the spawner most likely until they see many showers. It's possible that this bias towards the center 3/4ths or closer is what made players erroneously believe that said half point is the maximum range, but with a max range of 15 tiles this would lead to players underselling the actual max point by nearly 4 entire tiles on average, which could lead to a very rude surprise.

 

Suggestion for improvement on the math side of things, it really seems like the early devs were just scared of actually using circles back in the day. If you wanted a much more even distribution of meteors such that most are not falling near the spawner (which the existence of the fancy easing function and associated comment would indicate that that was the goal), you could have this just determine an angle and a distance. With an equally weighted angle from 0-360 for the degrees and an equally weighted distance 0-15 tiles you'd get a much cleaner even distribution of meteors. 

 

That said, I doubt just making a slightly better distribution of meteors would stop the rumors entirely. You'd be crossing into refresh territory at that point though, which may not be bad considering that meteor showers just create an unusable part of the map and lead to bad player experiences (based on feedback from this thread and many viewers over the years). 

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