New world gen in A17 B233 is horrible

[Krougal]

Same story different day here. They give us something and JUST as we are getting used to it they knee jerk yank it out. What a waste. I HATE these hodge podge maps. Why remove 2 fine biomes in plains and maple forest if all you were going to do was go back to this disgusting mess anyway?

 

I dont recall ANYONE begging to have back huge areas of wasteland and burnt forest, do you guys?

 

This!

[Frotus]

This!

 

A few proposed fixes to RWG:

- Larger biome areas

- More mountains, steep hills rather than mostly flat with some bumps in the heightmap

- Biomes based off topology

- More Biome diversity to match topology

- Water level relative to topology and not a fixed height to allow mountain lakes, connection streams/rivers and lowland swamps

- Bring back rivers / channels with added bridges etc. A few larger lakes is fine, just not the flooded map from A14 or 15 I think it was

- Roads laid more like real world - flatten dips and grade out humps for main roads w/ bridges over rivers

- Bring back tall building over 5/6 stories in larger cities

[Kattla]

The plains are still gone, yes?

 

Still, i think i like the patchwork better then the regular experimental rwg. Nice to see

progress on that front too.

 

There are however times i would love to see some preset "challenger" maps. IE, a single island, a single

city, etc.

 

OR maybe, just maybe, seeing as they are working on the RWG, would it be possible to

add a checklist to the RWG mixer with biomes?

As in, default is every biome, but if someone wanted more challenge, they could

make one huge wasteland map. Or, if for one reason or another want to exclude just

one or two, beeing able to make it so.

[JCrook1028]

I for one am glad to see the change back towards what we had. The snow north and desert south always maps just didn't do it for me. I want the randomness of biomes. yes the edges are very sharp in the example shown and too much wasteland but RWG is still very much a work in progress and I can almost guarantee this is not the final product. So in a nutshell. Yay RWG is returning!

[Myrrah]

Same story different day here. They give us something and JUST as we are getting used to it they knee jerk yank it out. What a waste. I HATE these hodge podge maps. Why remove 2 fine biomes in plains and maple forest if all you were going to do was go back to this disgusting mess anyway?

 

I dont recall ANYONE begging to have back huge areas of wasteland and burnt forest, do you guys?

 

after having spent all morning trying maps and then trying to edit the rwg to something i actually want to play in-i too will say "THIS!" lol

i really tried to be positive. geeeez

[timmodude]

I haven't decided if I like or dislike this new RWG. One thing I know I don't like is the prevalence of ruined/destroyed buildings in some of the towns. It seemed like the towns in the burnt/destroyed biomes were nearly all destroyed buildings with a very small number of real POI's.

 

https://imgur.com/a/xurJCL5

[Krougal]

yeah-it's not that i necessarily want them to have less area but the tiny patches everywhere are really annoying. it wouldn't be so bad except the sound and haze from wasteland patches being everywhere is annoying. burnt forest isn't so bad but still-it would be nice if they'd make large areas that are in varied locations instead of the tiny patches all over

 

I couldn't agree more.

 

While it's far from perfect, it's just that : random. Having snow north and desert south was no where near random enough, especially now they removed plains and maple forest biomes. I'd rather play like this than with the prior 3-layer "R"WG.

 

The 2 issues I see here :

- too few biomes that are worthwhile. This has been a major issue ever since the game started existing, but years later nothing has changed. Burnt forest has no upside and is just an awful place to be in (for both your character's temperature and your own fun), snow isn't really any better as you get cold and there's nothing special there (even though it has SOME merits, overall I just always avoid it and I'm perfectly fine never going there), which basically leaves you with forest and desert being the only "good" biomes.

- they removed plains and maple forest. Madmole stated "plains were useless", but I don't agree with this. First of all, it added diversity. But it was also mostly flat, had decent temperature values, and was actually the perfect spot to build on. Besides, it's not like burnt forest and snow pack more interest than plains...

 

I miss the good old days in A16 and prior where my first goal was to find that perfect spot where plains/forest/desert met. You had all you needed, a flat terrain to build on, a desert to get some aloe / yucca and easy birdnests, and the forest for all the rest. Finding that spot was another incentive to explore that got lost in A17.

 

Same here. Plains were the place to build a nice base. I never cared for the maple forest much but it would be a good transition to snow.

[TOX444]

I can only partially agree. There needs to be some kind of predictability with the biome generation if for nothing more than realism. Higher elevations would typically be colder and snowy, lower lying areas might be more arid like the desert, and I would personally love to see a swampy biome. Warmer temperatures and arid climates would be found more often in the south and more arctic climates would be found more prevalently in the north (assuming you live north of the equator). I do agree that long and occasionally wide rivers need to make a comeback, but not these monstrosities that would dominate the map and destroy the road generation system we had before. Also, if they are going to bring those huge rivers and large lakes back, I'd like to see some kind of boating option as many people have already stated. I'm not asking for a multimillion-dollar yacht to sit out in the middle of a lake and watch the apocalypse happen from afar, but we have all the makings already to build a raft or maybe even a canoe. Higher skill could allow for an actual boat to be made with the option to attach a motor to it along with a rudder and prop shaft that could either be crafted or found. I'm not downing TFP for making these changes because I feel that RWG should have an element of randomness to it, as the name implies, but when the random gen biome map looks like a patchwork quilt made by someone with cataracts and dementia there's going to be inconsistencies and issues.

 

 

This..... I agree. I was thinking along the same lines.

[Skeeter63082]

I haven't decided if I like or dislike this new RWG. One thing I know I don't like is the prevalence of ruined/destroyed buildings in some of the towns. It seemed like the towns in the burnt/destroyed biomes were nearly all destroyed buildings with a very small number of real POI's.

 

https://imgur.com/a/xurJCL5

 

That's been happing a lot in A17 in general. Apparently they had a huge problem with a lot of "downtown" buildings not spawning that has been fixed now. I assume this pertains to the large skysrapers we got in A16 as well as a lot of the mid sized POIs.

[Scyris]

This is progress in a way.

 

Randomly placed biomes are far better than the static crap they had.

 

Now... these biomes could be a little bigger and more dithered but... give them time.

 

I think this is a step in the right direction.

 

I had a feeling they added the random back to randomgen for biomes, when I was at the middle of the map with snow and desert biomes there where I spawned.

[Lazy8244]

I liked the North/south idea for Snow/Desert... would not mind seeing a east/west border area that could generate as sandbar type Islands that lead or end in the radiated area. I was ok with the A16 mess, I just need random. knowing where everything is on map start is what made me never ever play ark again after 2 weeks.

 

I do think, that finding a good balance between what was, and where they want to go would be like winning the Powerball 7x in a row...

 

But I have enjoyed using MUCH larger seed names.

 

ones that were liked

 

Dizzygrenade has a minigun

microwave your tea and don't care about when the brittish come to kill you

Lazy8244 has a fez, fez are cool

team giggity rides again, that means two things, double giggity

By the power of Grayskull

stick that tool where the sun shines not

laurie likes french toast and sausages

 

 

i mean, what is good/not good is also subjective. A general idea of what is liked more may help a little. (none of these seeds had less the 12 traders for an 8x8 map)

[Feycat]

Same story different day here. They give us something and JUST as we are getting used to it they knee jerk yank it out. What a waste. I HATE these hodge podge maps. Why remove 2 fine biomes in plains and maple forest if all you were going to do was go back to this disgusting mess anyway?

 

I dont recall ANYONE begging to have back huge areas of wasteland and burnt forest, do you guys?

 

I honestly feel like everything they're "fixing" in A17 is just sliding back to A16.

 

To be honest I liked the crazy patchwork we got in the initial A17 release. Now I don't even know.

[LuckyStar]

I had a feeling they added the random back to randomgen for biomes, when I was at the middle of the map with snow and desert biomes there where I spawned.

 

Yeah and it's a good sign.

 

I get that a lot of people are unhappy with RWG right now because I'm one of them.

 

I also remember MadMole talking about how LONG the process was to create the A16 RWG.

We're seeing development right before our eyes.

It's fascinating in a sense. Not so fun if you want to play, however.

 

It's just going to take time. We may not see a proper RWG till 17.2 or later.

That's just the reality of it.

 

Bleh! It's not fun waiting.

[Odin_the_Mad]

So as soon as the update came through i immediately started testing out RWG worlds in the previewer and they looked....awful lol. Most of the buildings in the towns are destroyed, the biome layout makes no sense, and im getting tons of "sunken" POI's. Whatever they did to try and fix the floating buildings ended up creating a new problem because i found numerous POI's like the trader where just the top was sticking out the sand. Didnt find a single skyscraper, there are more parking lots and parking garages than there are stores. it seems like most of the POI's are just junk. and i get lots of "empty cities" where there is a grid road layout but for some reason there are no buildings there.

 

This is not meant as a rage post, just posting the problems i see so that they can hopefully be resolved by the time stable comes out. But for now RWG is just unplayable for me, back to Navesgane.

 

A good solution to some of these issues would be what a previous poster suggested, a bunch of map templates that worked out the general layout of the map, city layouts and placement and then the individual buildings would be somewhat randomized depending on the zoning. so you might get a police station on the corner of an intersection or a fire station another time, but the POI would make sense based on its location in the city. and if you had enough of these kinds of templates (a few dozen or so) then you could still have tens of thousands of possible unique maps but they would all be of good quality, like navesgane

[Hellsmoke]

I agree, the new rwg is aweful. Loved it the way it looked when a17 first launched.

[custom_hero]

Almost perfect rwg is rwg of 16 alpha. You just need to get the result when the size and quality of the generated map will be the same as that of the alpha 16.

I didn’t switch to a17 in the first place because of the RWG A16, it’s the best

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Generated a couple of worlds. I did not find skyscrapers

[Darellion]

B233 RWG is a hot mess. keep the Snow-Forest-Desert transition just make the axis random. I get the cities being burned / wasteland, someone bombed the hell out them trying to wipe out the zombies, but dear lord not the random patchwork quilt again. I'm hoping since this is experimental that this reg for b233 is just that, an experiment and one that does not carry forward in the next build without major tweaking.

[Noompsie]

Are you guys joking or am I very lucky?

 

Seed: DogDoo

Size: 8k

 

One massive set of cities in an A16 style biome generator. So many POI's is mind boggling!

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]26419[/ATTACH]

The map center is just above the picture center in the green area.

 

Im going to try this seed because the other 5 I have tried have been a terrible mish mash of wasteland, burnt, snow with some green lands sprinkled in.

[Maynard69]

So glad to see the random biome placement back, but its already been stated that its a WIP and desert wont be touching snow anymore when its done (for you immersion junkies) The person working on it said there is several other priorities that he is required to do before the gets to RWG, but that its just a matter of time, he will get to it.

 

There was enough randomness taken away with recent changes. Making the "random" maps predicable was a placeholder for unfinished work only, it was not meant to be permanent.

 

Why anybody would get used to changes when they know its still experimental (and a pretty raw exp at that) is beyond me. As soon as I saw the first map I assumed or a tleast hoped without worry that it would change. It was boring and ez to know where to go automatically and killed replayabilty . You know just where you want to go whenever the need arises without having to explore at all, yawn. There was no need to find an ideal spot for your play style at all, after 1 playthrough you would know just where you want to go.

 

As for the uses for some of the biomes I see being called worthless, in the current unfinished state of the game there is already plenty, and Im sure more in the future.

 

The only worthless biome before was plains. (except for corn which we get from abandoned farms now without issue)

 

Burnt- is a great place to head on day 1 (pots and wrenches everywhere and the zombies are weak, aggro animals are rare) coal

Wasteland -is a great place to head later in the game (challenging zombies spawn even in open world, chance for ferals, zbears, dogs, ect) for excitement (not sure now, but I seem to remember nitrate being prevalent there too)

Forest- is great for hunting/ wood/ lead

Desert- aloe and sand for concrete, oil shale

Snow- High xp zombie spawns, no need for water source, wood, (used to be tree stumps and chance auger drops, both of which I miss now) nitrate

 

 

Many playthroughs I end up building in the wasteland because its slightly more challenging, which was decent for mid-end game. When I got an itch for a big project I would terraform a city block into a different biome so I would have nice scenery/ trees but still get to fight off dogs and tougher zombies.

 

Although I never settled in burnt, I am always looking for it day 1 for ez pot while I am on the move, and then again when I start making bullets to build a mine there. It usually ends up being the first place I stay the night though on most playthroughs as long as I find it.

[VulpesHilarianu]

Testing and tweaking and trying and retrying hasn't given me much to work with. But as I was thinking about it I did come up with a convincing idea for how to generate maps. Use a hex system. The map always starts generating from the first hex at the center of the map, which is always the forest biome. The hex shape itself is made of 16x16 chunks. Desert, wasteland, burnt, snow, radiation, and more forest biomes are generated on each of the six sides of the original forest biome. And it uses a spiral pattern from there, starting at the top hex of the last generated set. Desert biomes can spawn wasteland biomes on any side. Wasteland biomes can spawn burnt, desert, and forest. Forest can spawn wasteland and snow. Use whatever methods you want for blending and use a randomly generated musgrave texture for heightmaps, and be done with it.

[Maynard69]

To those going on about RWG right now, have patience. I work on gameplay systems too so I can't just spend hours upon hours on RWG right now. It's functional, the biome generator is running from xml again, now I need the time to clean it up. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do or what would look best. It never is. It's a matter of having the time to do it.

 

With the way RWG was created this release I'll be able to work on it without breaking worlds that players already have. With that though do realize, if there is a crafting bug, I have to work on it, not RWG. If there is a problem with buffs or effects or animations or progression, I have to work on those, not RWG. See where I'm going here? My time is at a premium and RWG will get it's love, just not right at this exact moment. There are bigger fish to fry than tweaking RWG to "perfection" right now.

 

When it comes to RWG, have faith. I have things in the fire, I just don't have time to finish them up prior to the holidays so I put in what I had ready to go and put the biome stuff back to the old a16 version until I get the new cellular automata (self sorting) biome code in place. Then snow and desert will never touch

and it's output looks very similar to that blobby image above that someone posted (already tested in a test project).

 

This was the quote regarding RWG. The "blobby" image he is referring to was one that was much less of a patchwork, and looked more natural. So there is no need to worry about how they are going to do it, they already know.

[crazyduck]

This was the quote regarding RWG. The "blobby" image he is referring to was one that was much less of a patchwork, and looked more natural. So there is no need to worry about how they are going to do it, they already know.

 

There is still enough to worry.

 

Biomes got removed Plains and also Forrest cause someone thought its useless, it was not .

If it comes to Ressources or Corn or something else, fine 1 Biome would be enough. Water from Lakes, everything else from loot. Why need more then 1 Biome?

Same the World Gen itself, all this Gravel with Iron or Potassium or other Stuff. If you dig you find tons of this with Stone layers as some sort of Border between the levels that looks bad.

 

Having a World with 60 % Gravel collapsing if you hit it sorry no thats a bad joke.

 

Prefabs is same. Last Patch removed many Entrys from rwgmixer.xml made it really a small file again and you see it in the world . We dont find many Prefabs we had in the world with the last version, so why this was removed?

 

And the only thing i read is its planned to fix the biome Placement and not add back removed biomes.

[Riv]

Cellular automata

https://www.emanueleferonato.com/2011/05/17/using-cellular-automata-to-generate-random-land-and-water-maps-with-flash/

 

Would like to see this used for forest and desert (less than 50% desert tho because vultures),

then add splats of burnt and wasteland at random,

then add snow to the high elevation areas.

 

Something like this but much better than my hand drawing.

 

I hope this is something like what Kinyajuu has in mind.

[SnowDog1942]

Random Biomes MUCH better than the static crap they had.

[Maynard69]

There is still enough to worry.

 

Biomes got removed Plains and also Forrest cause someone thought its useless, it was not .

If it comes to Ressources or Corn or something else, fine 1 Biome would be enough. Water from Lakes, everything else from loot. Why need more then 1 Biome?

Same the World Gen itself, all this Gravel with Iron or Potassium or other Stuff. If you dig you find tons of this with Stone layers as some sort of Border between the levels that looks bad.

 

Having a World with 60 % Gravel collapsing if you hit it sorry no thats a bad joke.

 

Prefabs is same. Last Patch removed many Entrys from rwgmixer.xml made it really a small file again and you see it in the world . We dont find many Prefabs we had in the world with the last version, so why this was removed?

 

And the only thing i read is its planned to fix the biome Placement and not add back removed biomes.

 

My few posts were responding to the subject of the thread. I dont expect them to get rid of gravel underground or add back old biomes. The 2 forests were redundant, plains, I am guessing they didnt have a use for with the stuff they still need to add. I wont miss it. I mean it might be enough for "you" to worry. I am far from worried about it. They are headed in the right direction.

 

Prefabs is another topic too. I hear in the future most if not all prefabs will be new level designed ones with possibly the option to add prefab packs to your game to get the old ones. (not confirmed) I am personally against that, I dont enjoy jump scares and dont want memorize a billion prefabs to bypass that, but meh, it is what it is. Games not done. Who knows how it will play when all the systems are in place and complete. Still not worried.