Land generation, folks?

[Russian]

Hi fellows, there I'm back.

Gotta share some observations and make a couple of suggestions.

After playing the game for a while (and getting killed quite a number of times) I have to say this. When the "novelty" factor is gone for a particular player ( i. e. me ) I seem to start generating one more and one more world, looking not to survive as long as I possibly can, but hoping for some curious setup to occur. Or even a glitch to occur - to make some kind of setup unique and "special" for me.

Firstly, the game's problem ( as it is now ) seems to be not a survival but the logistics. I spend hours (overall) just running from one place to another place with nothing interesting or challenging in between, and I kinda start to hate it - not running itself, but the sheer boredom of that. And from what I read on the forum, other people feel that, too, that's why they come with the suggestions to make "tunnels" or sort of "shortcuts" between the islands.

Or bikes. Or boats. Whatever.

As a result of the travel boredom, I don't die as Soon from "natural causes", but Sooner kill the current game and try to generate the world (with a default algorithm) in which the islands are close, or, even preferably, intersecting with each other -- to cut the "dead time" of traveling, but also to have some peculiar interactions between the flora and fauna. Say, to have pigs close to tallbirds. Or to be able to camp in a grassland, but not far from the swamp - to occasionally go fishing ( I just like how it is done ), to use the quickly re-spawning frogs for foods, and to chase/to pull the annoying creatures into the tentacles of a swamp beast

It seems to me that the default land generation routine has 2 random parameters - the approximate size of "biomes" and the average distance between them. So, a suggestion: I would love to be able to affect those values, at least somewhat, at least in a "sandbox" mode of play, - to be able to ask for a world that's bigger or smaller and more wide-spread of less. Oh, and to have some randomness in the total number of "bioms", - not ALWAYS and exactly 9 of them, but plus-minus a few.

Recently I was playing in a world that had 1 big island, 1 REALLY HUGE and the rest of it was so small that I went "pffeew", and deleted that game. It's a problem. Also it is a problem when all 9 bioms are arranged so that they are connected by a single road, running from 1st to the last without any intersections. Especially when the "islands" are rather small and the "bridges" are extended...

And it is even worse with the new map generation algorithm which is under testing. The sheer amount of "nothingness" it generates makes me never want to use it.

So a second suggestion. Instead of making the shapes of islands "weird" but not oval, how about making the way it works totally different? Like this:

(a) the phase one generates the overall mass of land surrounded by the "world ocean"

(b) phase two "carves" bays and "rivers" and "lakes" in it ( bays start from the shore, lakes are placed randomly, and rivers flow from lakes to shores and bays )

© then the "all the same" landmass is "seeded" with biomes, that start at random spots, and spread in a round shape untill their borders meet either a bay or river or a border of another biom? ( possibly with a bit of overlay, just for fun

I believe that THAT kind of map generation routine would make a real difference from a default one, and without the hassle of extra-long travels across the meaningless (and poorly connected!) masses of land.

Thanks for listening

BTW I'm kinda programmer myself, though I'm using Perl mostly, not Lua, but heck

[james4832]

I fully agree with both of those points. The alternate transport would add some balancing issues though...