Call for ToolsNotIncluded Map Browser screenshots

[Commander Steps]

Hello everyone,

We're working on re-creating the now-defunct ToolsNotIncluded (TNI) service through https://mapsnotincluded.org/.

To help with this, I'm looking for old screenshots of the original TNI tool to use as a reference for our rebuild. 

If anyone has screenshots from when the tool was still active, please consider sharing them with us.

Additionally, if you have any new ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Best regards,

Steps

[asurendra]

I found few screens of map-showing feature. Hope thats help!

[gigamoi]

From what I remember from this one time when I peeked into the website network calls out of curiosity, the biome layout images are SVG. It makes sense for these to use this format as they mostly consist of colored shapes. The POIs icons are then independently laid on top through HTML/CSS z-index shenanigans.

However, I don't think you should aim to closely emulate the original site. First, what really matter is its features, not its look. And secondly, some features ought to be reimplemented differently, or not at all, as to not fall into the same pitfalls. A key issue the original website faced is complex query timeout. I don't know how to tackle this problem, but it so happened that, as the database grew bigger and bigger, it could no longer run queries with more than a few criteria efficiently enough to serve results within a reasonable time frame. I would argue that this severely impeded the service quality as looking up for the "perfect seed" is the whole point of the app.

That being said, facing the map browser's gradual loss of usability and demise, I came wonder if indexing and querying seeds was really the best way to do the job. If people use the site to find seeds that conform to a desired set of starting conditions, within what vanilla worldgen allows, wouldn't it be simpler to mod the game as to allow them to just set what the worldgen will do instead of letting it proceed randomly? That's how I came to learn how to alter worldgen in such a way for my own needs.

[Commander Steps]

Thank you for your suggestions!

Yes, creating an SVG for the biome map makes a lot of sense.

Which features of the original site did you find most useful, and which ones would you consider dropping?

I remember the timeouts and slowness in the final weeks before the site went down. Unfortunately, Cairath didn't provide details about what went wrong, so we might face similar challenges. However, the key difference is that this will be an open-source tool, so we won’t be tackling the problem alone. We're planning to use a MongoDB NoSQL database, as it's better suited for handling large amounts of data and scaling efficiently. Time will tell if this approach holds up.

Regarding the map browser, I personally prefer to use original seeds without mods. This makes it easier to share with others without requiring them to install mod XY and customize various settings. Maybe it’s just personal preference, but playing on an unmodified seed feels more authentic to me.

[blakemw]

I love that the project is opensource this time. I'd have loved to tackle the slow queries since I could see absolutely no reason why the queries should be slow, maybe it was the choice of database or poor use of indexes, but queries which should have been really fast would take a long time to execute.

[asurendra]

15 hours ago, Commander Steps said:

Which features of the original site did you find most useful, and which ones would you consider dropping?

 

First is ability to find seeds with certain combination of geysers and world traits. Second is amount of resources available to mine. Both especially important in SO, as it can generate asteroids without a single water geyser, for example...  

 

Map layout for me is not that important. I dont know how much space and CPU time it takes, but if many, it can be dropped...

[blakemw]

I found map layout quite important. I don't think it takes much data, I never looked at the request data, but all it should be is the center point of the Biomes and then you apply a nearest neighbour algorithm for display.

I also found the resource summaries (how much water, granite, bleachstone etc) important.

One thing I'd like, though I'd gladly implement it myself, is aggregations, or summaries of the data, like "what percentages of seeds have no Cool Steam Vents".

[asurendra]

10 hours ago, blakemw said:

I found map layout quite important. I don't think it takes much data

IMHO biggest problem lays in story traits and DLC merging feature. Like you get one seed with more than 10 variants. And thats will become even worse when we get another DLC to merge (we probably will)

[Commander Steps]

1 hour ago, asurendra said:

IMHO biggest problem lays in story traits and DLC merging feature. Like you get one seed with more than 10 variants. And thats will become even worse when we get another DLC to merge (we probably will)

I believe TNI maps were all collected without story traits and I would do the same, because otherwise we would need to reset the database on new story traits or have an incomplete state.

If TNI ever comes back we will see what Cairath does with the mixing feature, but for the first iteration I would turn it off.

So all seed are the ones that end with -0-0-0

[Commander Steps]

I'm excited to share that we've made some great progress!

After exploring various designs, we've decided on this approach for representing a cluster. The starting asteroid spans the entire row and features a thicker border to highlight its importance. The remaining asteroids are arranged in a grid that adjusts responsively based on the view size.


You can check it out at https://stefan-oltmann.de/oni-seed-browser/

The data is currently static, but it was gathered using a fully functional mod and backend service.

Everything is open source and will remain so. If you'd like to fork or contribute, you can find the repository at https://github.com/stefanoltmann/oni-seed-browser, which also includes links to the necessary tools if you want to run it yourself.

You can access all the raw data collected by the mod so far here:
all_worlds.json

These will soon be browsable using the tool above.
We will also regularly share data dumps on the MapsNotIncluded.org Discord.

Have a great day!

[asurendra]

Thats awesome! Is it possible to add hover text to geysers? Im not so good in game to understand which vent it is just by its color

[Jorge Junior]

Could you please back up your web files to services like Drive or OneDrive?
Don't close the website and leave.
Thanks

[Commander Steps]

49 minutes ago, asurendra said:

Thats awesome! Is it possible to add hover text to geysers? Im not so good in game to understand which vent it is just by its color

Yes, that's the plan. There will also be a more detailed Geyser overview, a starmap, and other features.

Currently, I'm focused on the backend and the search functionality to get the core operations up and running as quickly as possible.

12 minutes ago, Jorge Junior said:

Could you please back up your web files to services like Drive or OneDrive?
Don't close the website and leave.
Thanks

It's all open source and hosted on GitHub, and I think it might be a good idea to share the database dumps there as well.

I have no plans to shut down the website, but even if I do, others can continue from here. The whole idea is to create a seed browser that doesn't share the same vulnerabilities as TNI.

With TNI, we're all relying on the will of a single person, and it seems that person is no longer interested. My goal for this community is to solve that issue.