A20: how can this happen twice??

[Ghostlight]

I've been messing with A20 for some time. With many restarts on the 6k pregen map just to get the feel of the new early game and test stuff. I have since then began 2 proper playthroughs: single player and another one with my usual group on the same map. Some weird stuff is going on...

 

Every time I start anew on that map, I spawn in are more or less the same place, near the same town and within view of the trader in that town. Every time. Is that a bug? Or something about you will always spawn within a few hundred meters of a trader now??

 

But it gets weirder. Because I had the 2 play throughs on the go with the same spawn point, I went straight to the exact same house I had in the first one to make my initial 1st night hole up place on its roof. In my earliest play though, while I was sheltering in that house spending the first night crafting and cooking, a wolf turned up and fought with a couple of zombies wandering outside. Well on the second play through, exactly the same thing happened. A wolf turn up at the same place and same time during the night and fought with some nearby zombies. 

 

How?

[pApA^LeGBa]

The spawn points are the same on the same map for me aswell. And it´s always close to the trader.

 

The really weird thing that i have is that i always find the schematic for the vehicle offroad lights mod on day one as the first recipe, even when i joined  in a MP game that was on day 3 this was the first schematic i found on my first day. Same after a new clean install for A20 stable.

 

I more and more fear that we wouldn´t have stable if it wasn´t for christmas. Downtown is still a hardware hog (pretty sure this is unplayable with minimum requirements as listed on steam) Quests suddenly are finished and the last orange dot for the last enemy simply dissappears. Feels like a sale release for me.

Edited December 23, 2021 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Krougal]

For some time huh? A20 came out way back in the....2 weeks ago 😛

Sorry, I just got a laugh out of that.

 

Yes, I feel a strange sense of Deja Vu often in A20, it's like the RNG seed affects a lot of things.

 

I swear that damn offroad light is the ONLY vehicle mod schematic I find, I have a stack of them.

 

Yeah, Papa is right, it was rushed out for the holiday sale. It should have sat in the oven a bit longer, although I guess it doesn't really matter because it's not like they won't have 3 or 4 updates to the alpha after the fact.

Edited December 23, 2021 by Krougal (see edit history)

[PoppaSmirk]

1 hour ago, Ghostlight said:

I've been messing with A20 for some time. With many restarts on the 6k pregen map just to get the feel of the new early game and test stuff. I have since then began 2 proper playthroughs: single player and another one with my usual group on the same map. Some weird stuff is going on...

 

Every time I start anew on that map, I spawn in are more or less the same place, near the same town and within view of the trader in that town. Every time. Is that a bug? Or something about you will always spawn within a few hundred meters of a trader now??

 

But it gets weirder. Because I had the 2 play throughs on the go with the same spawn point, I went straight to the exact same house I had in the first one to make my initial 1st night hole up place on its roof. In my earliest play though, while I was sheltering in that house spending the first night crafting and cooking, a wolf turned up and fought with a couple of zombies wandering outside. Well on the second play through, exactly the same thing happened. A wolf turn up at the same place and same time during the night and fought with some nearby zombies. 

 

How?

 

I'm unsure if this situation is a bug,  or intentional.  I do know that in My MP world  ( My only world really, so far with Alpha 20)   I was surprised that when a Friend came to join in,   I waited,  expecting that I would need to bicycle out to them,  since normally when someone new spawns in,  they wind up at least a kilometer away.  But two of My friends that have come to play,  have spawned in at almost exactly the same spot that I did right after creating the world, a week ago.  My original woodframe with campfire tossed on top has been quite literally within the field of view of both of My friends when they spawned into My world.   That spot is roughly 187 meters from the trading post.   So yes,  I have noticed it too.

[GlyphGryph]

1 hour ago, Ghostlight said:

How?

 

The RNG in this game is seeded. It means that if you start the same way, on the same map, and do the same stuff, the same stuff will happen to you in return, because the same rolls are being made in the same order. It's not a coincidence, it's ultimately how all RNGs worked that aren't hooked into a noise generator, this game just does a lot less to obfuscate it by adding additional RNG layers.

I remember this being a big complaint in the newer X-com games as well for a while - people would keep reloading a save and making the same shot and missing it over and over again, growing increasingly more frustrated, because they didn't realize the sequence of rolls was pretty much predetermined and saved along with the rest of the state. I believe they eventually changed it so that the seed was reloaded with a random seed (generated from an admittedly still deterministic global RNG, but sufficiently decoupled that each reload would have different outcomes since it would generate a new seed each time)

Edited December 23, 2021 by GlyphGryph (see edit history)

[Ornias]

57 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

The spawn points are the same on the same map for me aswell. And it´s always close to the trader.

 

The really weird thing that i have is that i always find the schematic for the vehicle offroad lights mod on day one as the first recipe, even when i joined  in a MP game that was on day 3 this was the first schematic i found on my first day. Same after a new clean install for A20 stable.

 

I more and more fear that we wouldn´t have stable if it wasn´t for christmas. Downtown is still a hardware hog (pretty sure this is unplayable with minimum requirements as listed on steam) Quests suddenly are finished and the last orange dot for the last enemy simply dissappears. Feels like a sale release for me.

 

Funny on my current world that I have restarted 3 times now I get the semi auto mod schematic everytime out of the 1st trashbag. 

[Boidster]

1 hour ago, Ornias said:

Funny on my current world that I have restarted 3 times now I get the semi auto mod schematic everytime out of the 1st trashbag.

 

Interesting. I just started three new games using the same RWG world and I got different results from my 1st trash search in each. I spawned in different places on the map each time, but I always searched a trash pile on the road (before taking any other action besides walking/running). Got rocks the first time, and sand + cloth the second time, glue + lead weights 3rd time.

[katarynna]

I believe i remember reading that if you choose the same game name on the same map, your spawn location will be identical as well as the loot and loot containers you initially come across.

 

The game name determines all of that.

 

I could be wrong, but i swear i read that.

[Krougal]

2 hours ago, katarynna said:

I believe i remember reading that if you choose the same game name on the same map, your spawn location will be identical as well as the loot and loot containers you initially come across.

 

The game name determines all of that.

 

I could be wrong, but i swear i read that.

It used to be that the game name determined the seed and possibly what you read is out of date. Now the game name and seed are separate and I doubt the name has any effect. I could be wrong too.

[katarynna]

14 minutes ago, Krougal said:

It used to be that the game name determined the seed and possibly what you read is out of date. Now the game name and seed are separate and I doubt the name has any effect. I could be wrong too.

The game name never determined the seed, as far as i know. The seed name determines the world generated.

 

The GAME name definitely determines where you spawn. I also remember reading that it determines the loot containers and loot that you initially come across.

 

So if you start a game named popcorn on a seed named yahoo valley and make note of where you spawn and what loot you get from immediately visible loot containers, you can reproduce this 100% by deleting that game and restarting a new game named popcorn on a seed named yahoo valley. If your first game had a q2 iron shovel and 3 oil in a trash pile next to where you spawned, the new game should have the exact same loot in the exact same container.

[Ghostlight]

I've never used the same name, as these saves are still both active. The names are similar though; differing only in a number suffix.

[pApA^LeGBa]

9 hours ago, Ornias said:

 

Funny on my current world that I have restarted 3 times now I get the semi auto mod schematic everytime out of the 1st trashbag. 

 

I didn´t even restart the same world. I got the same recipe in different worlds and troughout every version of A20 so far. It´s not the first thing i loot, but it´s always the first recipe i get. And always on day one, or on my first day when joining a game from others.

 

Edited December 24, 2021 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Pernicious]

I remember when I was taught programming nearly 25 years ago, they always told us if we wanted something to be unpredictably random, we had to use something that constantly changes as the seed, like the time down to milliseconds. If we just wanted something that just appeared random, but is repeatable for debugging, specify the seed yourself.  Wonder if the programmers just use the same user provided seed for many rolls. Or chain the seed (The result of the last random generation affects the next random generation).

 

As for always spawning close to a trader... Yes, close, assuming you have a car already...