World gen: What does the size of the map change ?

[Saiph]

I have created a mod adding about 60 biomes to the world generation. With the default size "Large" this results in a very long map generation process. I think it is because it restarts many times until being able to give a sufficient size for all biomes.

So I would like to give the game a bigger map to make more room for the biomes. I tried using the "Huge" size. But it doesn't change anything, in fact it seems to take even more time. I am wondering if this option doesn't actually make the biomes bigger instead of the map (which would make things even worse).

So what does this option do ?

 

Also a somewhat related question: the game size that "huge maps require powerful servers". Is that really true ? It seems to me that off-screen regions are "paused" and so the world size shouldn't matter.

[ZupaleX]

They are not really paused. A simulation is run on the offscreen parts. If it was paused you could walk away from your base for a year and come back with all your food at the same spoilage level they were when you left. This is not the case. And this is just an example of the simulations which happen off screen.

As for your question I am not sure I understand really well.

The more biome you add to the world generation, the longer it will take. I did not do worldgen mod in a long time but as far as I remember what happens is that each piece you create have "keys" and "locks". If you biome has a "key" matching another biome "lock", these biomes can be connected to each other. Then the game take a random set from your worldgen (after applying some weight to the random pick if I remember properly) and then check the "keys" of this set, and finally take a random other set with a matching "lock" for one of these "keys".

So the more biome you put in the pool, the longer it will take for the world generation procedure to complete. I don't think there is much to do about that. You could try to lower the amount of "keys" and "locks" to your biomes, maybe you were a bit too generous when providing these. If you offer less possibility to the random picker, it would as a consequence be faster to pick.

The huge map just increase the size of the map, so will result in more biomes and possibly bigger ones as well.

 

This is a simplified explanation of the process but I believe it is accurate enough. As I said last time I worked on worldgen mod was more than a year ago so I might not recall all the details properly, so if someone reads this and has a more accurate information please correct me.

[Saiph]

21 hours ago, ZupaleX said:

They are not really paused. A simulation is run on the offscreen parts. If it was paused you could walk away from your base for a year and come back with all your food at the same spoilage level they were when you left. This is not the case. And this is just an example of the simulations which happen off screen.

For the example you mentioned it is not incompatible with pausing the game, as long as the new spoilage level is computed when the player comes back near the object. There is no need to refresh it before and the new spoilage is just the time elapsed since the player left. Of course that doesn't mean it is possible for every object in the game but I believe for this example (the spoilage) simulation might be paused.

 

21 hours ago, ZupaleX said:

As for your question I am not sure I understand really well.

Let me give more details. I have changed the storygen.lua file to remove the locks/key system and create custom shapes. I have also changed the number of tasks that the game will try to place, it is exactly 60.

The problem is that since it is a huge number, the game doesn't easily manage to place 60 tasks when generating the world and restarts many times (until it finds an arrangement. This mechanism is present in the original code.)

So in my case, I am looking for an option to increase the size of the world map. Not the biomes but the "square" where they are placed. "Huge" seems to increase this size, but it doesn't make the generation better, so I am wondering whether it does something else.