Why do random and pre-gen worlds have so much duplication?

[Arez]

Duplicate POIs, duplicate areas and duplicate traders. I can understand there being duplication if the world is gigantic, but even small random worlds have a lot of duplication, on top of not even having all the POIs. 

 

Outside of the larger worlds, would random and pre-gen worlds just not work without duplication? Is it necessary?

[8_Hussars]

How many unique POIs do you think there are?

[stallionsden]

3 hours ago, Arez said:

Duplicate POIs, duplicate areas and duplicate traders. I can understand there being duplication if the world is gigantic, but even small random worlds have a lot of duplication, on top of not even having all the POIs. 

 

Outside of the larger worlds, would random and pre-gen worlds just not work without duplication? Is it necessary?

As 8_hussar said.

 

You would need something in the fortitude of 14000 or more pois for no duplication. For traders you would need a lot more as well

[zztong]

4 hours ago, Arez said:

Outside of the larger worlds, would random and pre-gen worlds just not work without duplication? Is it necessary?

 

Assuming you're talking about using just Vanilla content...

 

You could maybe do 1 City, 1 Country Town, 1 Western Town but you still might run short of houses for Residential in the City. In the Wilderness you could spread everything out. I think you'd have to place everything by hand.

 

It's a question of math. For each City, you have some number of Districts. For each District, you have some number of Tiles. For each Tile, there are certain POI markers to fill depending on the specific Tile. There aren't enough Tiles to avoid repeating those, so you're going to get some repeating Tile content. It's amazing how thin POIs can get when you subdivide them into Districts and Sizes that make them eligible to be on Tiles.

 

If you start adding custom POIs you can begin to alleviate the repetition, but you're going to need lots and lots of POIs and Tiles to fill an 8k map with entirely unique content. I suspect Vanilla plus The Community hasn't made enough POIs yet to do that. (And The Community has made lots and lots of POIs.)

 

Traders are easy to make unique. There's usually 10 of them. Trim the map back to 5 traders and they're unique.

Edited February 12 by zztong (see edit history)

[Loboling]

Someone posted a mod that I've been using that ensures all pois are used, and minimizes the maximum amount per poi to 2. This makes the maps feel a lot more diverse. 

You can find it here:
https://7daystodiemods.com/improved-rwg/

I modified it for my purposes, so let me know if you want an updated version. I can share it in a pm. I used this for compo packs and had a really interesting world. Was running it on my Seven Deadly Sins server, I can share the map too if anyone is interested, but you need 3 mods for it to work. (MPLogue, PEP, ZZTongs)

[Max Headroom]

It also helps to increase the number of distinct POIs the generator has to work with by adding in prefab collections. I use those from ZZTong and MPLogue. 

[Riamus]

As others have said, it's a matter of number of POI available.  There aren't enough vanilla POI to not have a lot of duplication.  Once you start adding a lot of custom POI, the duplication drops dramatically but will still be there.  This applies also to traders.  You can reduce POI on the map to limit duplication, of course.  Teragon, a third party map generator, can set a maximum number of spawns for each POI if you want, even if it means you have a lot of empty space from lack of POI.  I don't really recommend that route because having only 1 of each POI on the map is going to make for a VERY empty map.  At least, not unless you're doing a 2k map or something small like that.  The best thing to do is just to use more custom POI and you'll have a decent diversity.

[Maharin]

On a side note, if you look at the real world around you there will be lots of duplication, too.  This is especially true in housing areas.

[Ramethzer0]

If No Man's Sky has taught me anything, is that procedural generation of worlds that can have vastly different/similar makeups is that you either finding a cosmos full of planets with the same 4 biomes that all look eerily alike, or a cosmos that looks like a jackson pollock painting.

 

I can't imagine it being much different in 7 days.

[Arez]

On 2/11/2024 at 2:55 PM, 8_Hussars said:

How many unique POIs do you think there are?

Enough to fill a small map the size of Navezgane. Like I said, a giant map is another story. 

I've generated small maps where there were plenty of duplicates and missing POIs.

[Adam the Waster]

I don't mind the copy paste pois. Unless one of the same is right next to each other. 

 

I like the system that they are doing with module pois with stuff like strip malls. 

 

Kinda wish we had some more post Apocalypse pois. 

[Riamus]

14 hours ago, Arez said:

Enough to fill a small map the size of Navezgane. Like I said, a giant map is another story. 

I've generated small maps where there were plenty of duplicates and missing POIs.

You need to understand how POI placement on tiles works.  Not all POI can be placed on each tile.  There are limitations by district and by availability of sizes for that POI.  For example, many tier 5 POI can only be placed on a few different tiles.  If you have small towns (this is common on a small map), there aren't enough tiles that work with that POI size for the POI to get placed.  A21 also added the duplicate distance parameter and put it on tier 5 POIs with a distance of 10,000m.  This means that you'll never have more that one of a specific tier 5 POI on a map unless your map size is large enough to have more than 10km between them (not sure if every tier 5 has this value, but skyscrapers do).  Also, you will find that things can often appear duplicated just because there are so many of similar POI available.  Gas stations, for example, have many versions and some look very similar.  Houses also can look very similar and many are placed in towns.  So you will see what appears to be duplication even when it isn't necessarily duplication.  And Old West towns are especially sparse in POI, so those will very often look almost the same.

 

So there are many factors that play a part in how maps turn out and how much duplication or missing POI you might have.  Unfortunately, RWG has very limited options, so you have little control over some of these factors without using a third party map generator.  Probably your best option if you want to have fewer missing POI is to have larger towns, though that also means greater chance of duplication.  So it's a balancing act of possibly more duplication to get more different POI or less duplication but have more missing POI.

[Arez]

On 2/11/2024 at 5:48 PM, Loboling said:

Someone posted a mod that I've been using that ensures all pois are used, and minimizes the maximum amount per poi to 2. This makes the maps feel a lot more diverse. 

I might actually try this.

3 hours ago, Riamus said:

Unfortunately, RWG has very limited options

So the answer is the process of random world generation is limited. The duplication aspect is what keeps me returning to Navezgane. People keep saying stuff like "Oh I only played Navezgane for a few hours and now I only play on random maps". The duplication kills the vibe for me. Once a quest sends me to a duplicate trader, I'm just about done with that save.

Edited February 13 by Arez (see edit history)

[Riamus]

It is easy to have only one of each trader if you want that.  Or use custom traders, though as far as I know, they all use the same character models.  I am one of those who doesn't play Navesgane.  I prefer having random maps, though I only use Teragon for my maps now as it gives me a lot more control of what the map will look like. 

 

It is interesting that you will play the exact same map repeatedly without considering that boring or repetitive, but seeing the same trader in different places or the same POI in different places bothers you.  I would rather have different maps even if there is some duplication. 😀

[8_Hussars]

 

20 hours ago, Arez said:

Enough to fill a small map the size of Navezgane. Like I said, a giant map is another story. 

I've generated small maps where there were plenty of duplicates and missing POIs.

Note that Navezgane is a hand built map.  Riamus provided a great explanation of why this happens with RWG.

Perhaps you need to look at using the Compo Pack.

Edited February 13 by 8_Hussars (see edit history)

[Javabean867]

I've noticed a lot of the suburbs look very similar on the same map.  I was living in a forest biome doing my thing, and decided to go to a small town in the winter biome, and i found basically the same exact neighborhood, down to the powerline small poi right across from the same small green house  that i turned into a base.

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, Javabean867 said:

I've noticed a lot of the suburbs look very similar on the same map.  I was living in a forest biome doing my thing, and decided to go to a small town in the winter biome, and i found basically the same exact neighborhood, down to the powerline small poi right across from the same small green house  that i turned into a base.

The game uses tiles.  Much of what is on the tile remains the same each time it is used.  Only the POI, and to some extent (depends on how the part is set up), parts, can change.  And vanilla only has 1 of each type of tile for each district.  For example, if you go to a small town and see a rural corner tile and then go to another small town that has a rural corner tile, it is going to look the same even if the POI are different.

 

The only way to reduce that is to increase the number of tiles being used.  That means using custom tiles.  Maybe TFP will add more tiles at some point, but untill they do (if they do), custom tiles are the only way to avoid/limit that.

 

It is at least better than before when every trader was on the exact same tile and so you always had the same looking area around each trader on every map.  That was worse than finding similar looking tiles mixed into towns.

[zztong]

On 2/13/2024 at 2:36 PM, Arez said:

So the answer is the process of random world generation is limited.

 

You might say that, but I would phrase it otherwise. The process of random world generation is capable of much more randomization, but the amount of material available to it to use is limited.

 

For example, the Vanilla game comes with 47 Tiles, essentially 1 of each type (with few exceptions). If RWG needs a "Country Residential Corner" tile, you're getting "rwg_tile_countryresidential_corner" for certain because that's the only choice available to RWG. Assume you're making a Vanilla 8k map ... RWG might use that tile 12 times. That means the little garage on that Tile appears in your world 12 times. That Tile also demands some POIs be placed...

 

So for that tile, RWG has to try to find 4 POIs of size Extra Small (25x25) as well as 7 POIs of size Small (42x42) that are tagged as "countryresidential" to put onto that Tile. If that Tile appears 12 times on your map, then RWG needs 48 XS POIs and 84 S POIs that are tagged as "countryresidential." The game only comes with 62 POIs that have that tag, and some of those probably aren't either of those sizes. You can either have duplicates or empty lots in your Country Town. RWG will use duplicates.

 

Again, assuming you're talking about an 8k map -- If you want to eliminate duplicate Tiles, then you probably need 12 more Country Residential Corner Tiles. If you want to eliminate duplicate POIs in the Country Residential district, then you probably need around another 80 POIs just for Country Residential.

 

I feel for you. I looked to world generation starting in A19 and concluded the biggest need was world variety and that numbers of POIs was the answer. Then in A20 with the advent of Tiles, I concluded Tiles and POIs was the answer. That's driven the development of my collection of Tiles and POIs -- numbers. Try to keep the quality at an average level, and address the numbers.

 

The numbers are staggering. I doubt we ever reach having enough Tiles and POIs for an 8k world to be completely unique. Throw in the CompoPack if you really want to attack variety as that's something like 2,500 POIs. It still won't be enough. You either need to thin out the number of cities and wilderness POIs, shrink the map, perhaps both, or start cranking out the content.

 

For reference, counting the number of POIs with a "countryresidential" tag:

zztong@ZZMonolith:~/7dData/Prefabs/POIs$ grep "name=\"Tags\"" *.xml | grep "countryresidential" | wc -l
62

 

Edited February 14 by zztong
fixed typos; added grep command for those who are curious (see edit history)

[warmer]

I can't remember which Random Gen tool it is, (KingGen or Terragon) but there is a setting where you can force it to only use each POI 1x before it uses a POI again. So a dup is incredibly rare to find in game, let alone near each other.

[zztong]

12 hours ago, warmer said:

I can't remember which Random Gen tool it is, (KingGen or Terragon) but there is a setting where you can force it to only use each POI 1x before it uses a POI again. So a dup is incredibly rare to find in game, let alone near each other.

 

I could be wrong, but I believe RWG's "bias and weight" feature should accomplish similar if you don't mess around with them to much. It will also prioritize placement of higher tiers over lower tiers, keeping your lower tiers from filling up all the space. This is handy because there are fewer higher tier POIs and people hate maps that are short on higher tier content.

[zztong]

I'll take this conversation as an opportunity to express if I thought RWG had a gap, it is when dealing with an overabundance of Tiles. The bias/weight system I think handles an overabundance of POIs, but bias/weight does not affect Tiles. Thus, when RWG is given a large selection of Tiles for a specific District, it doesn't take into account how many times it has previously used each Tile.