Tuning options for rooms

[SymKensaki]

With the ever growing world size potential, I feel this game would benefit greatly from some more precise tuning options rather than the nuclear "lots/always" option that blankets the landscape with inappropriately placed objects.  Sure, you can demand that the world only generate prefabs on certain backgrounds via the terrain.lua file, but why not just work off of the room parameters themselves?

I don't really know anything about modding the way modding is supposed to be done, so I'm just filling the main files with garbage code; however, the basic idea is thus:

TUNING = {

    DISTRIBUTEPREFABS_MULTIPLIER = 2,

    COUNTPREFABS_MULTIPLIER = 2,

}

countprefabs= {

    goldnugget = function() return 3 + math.random(3) * TUNING.COUNTPREFABS_MULTIPLIER end,

},

distributepercent = 0.25 * TUNING.DISTRIBUTEPREFABS_MULTIPLIER,

And so on and so forth.  This way you can adjust up and down to make everything more numerous or more sparse while still adhering to the framework of the room.  This tuning could be taken further by inserting, say, BERRYBUSH_MULTIPLIER into tuning and then multiplying the berrybush section of distributeprefabs = {} by it.  This would adjust overall berrybushes, but again produce them in the places they belong as well as in densities that follow the intent of the worldgen.

 

Finally, I think you could go even one step beyond and set up "threat" parameters in tuning which could be used to add bad stuff to the world while still allowing the basic world construction to have some rules regarding how such threat interacts with the different rooms.  Again I do not know what I am doing so this is just cludged together garbage, but it seems like negative values worldgen as if they were zero, so this is how I'm running it right now:

distributeprefabs = {

    houndbone = -.33 + (.33 * TUNING.HOUND_THREAT),

    houndmound = -.15 + (.15 * TUNING.HOUND_THREAT),

},

This way you can set up thresholds in the world for if you decide to crank up the hounds, the hounds will first only appear in places that they belong, but as you push that number higher and higher they will start to creep into safer and safer places (while becoming truly awful in their homes).  Maybe you could add a "houndbone = (-.33 + (.33*TUNING.FORCED_HOUNDINESS)) + (.33 * TUNING.HOUND_THREAT)" kind of deal if you want the players to be able to override thresholds with a FORCED_HOUNDINESS 0 or 1 true or false flag.

 

Regardless of what is done, the idea is to keep the worldgen adjustments within the rooms and biomes they belong, and keeping their rate of population controlled so that world's general parameters are adhered to without creating a nightmare wasteland just because you wanted more tallbirds.  I'm sure the option to do things the way it currently works could also stay in the game in case that's what someone wanted, but a little more in the way of tuning options would work wonders.

[KitcheVadimas]

On 1/30/2016 at 8:18 PM, SymKensaki said:

Regardless of what is done, the idea is to keep the worldgen adjustments within the rooms and biomes they belong, and keeping their rate of population controlled so that world's general parameters are adhered to without creating a nightmare wasteland just because you wanted more tallbirds.  I'm sure the option to do things the way it currently works could also stay in the game in case that's what someone wanted, but a little more in the way of tuning options would work wonders.

  Yeah, I want this.  Setting Chess monsters to more should result in more chess biomes spawning, not random chess pieces wrecking havoc upon the world.  Same with Tallbirds, or hound mounds or whatever else.  In more populated servers where 1 desert may not supply enough flowers in 1 day to give everyone flower shirts, the option to set cacti to 'more' should be a reasonable one.