Planet surfaces and bonuses are bit random

from GalCiv4 Forums

Are worlds using procedural input properly?  they seem very random, not coerced like we normally do for terrain / ecosystem / biomass generation ?  for a game that leans heavily on planetary hex building (much more heavily than it's predecessors now that ship mass building is gone) it would make sense to build out planets this way:

Form a standard procedural generation for the planet abstract hex map using a few waves of noise to build a nice Fourier for height (fbm is quite good for this hit me up if you want some c# libs), then the positions and values are input into a temperature map and a moisture map, the temp and moisture map are then post processed to normalize each other and that gives you the 3 points of info you need for the surface biome map H/M/T (height, moisture, temperature), use a bicubic interpolation to get the smoothed values to build your actual planet surface tinting, and then you can model areas of a planet that should be X and Y, like maybe science is in colder areas so the science cells are more likely to be at top or bottom of a map.   The reason why this approach isn't just overproduction, it's because currently there is no cohesion at all, you end up with a zero science planet with a +3 science bonus on it, and they'll be stippled all across the planets surface which is a bit head scratchy and it makes most planets layouts worthless for adjacency bonuses, i tend to just ignore them now because if i didn't ignore them i'd not get as much of a bonus as i do by just having them stack side by side.  The chances of a planet having the exact layout that would be useful is near zero, and i love the potential of the bonuses i really want to see that come alive but doing so needs some procedural chops.

Another thing you could look into is Voronoi cells, if you'd rather set the science/money/manufactury/food etc prior to the generation of the planet then you could generate cells by the number of different types of resource you want this planet to have more than zero of then adjust the size of those cells to match the volume you want to put on the planets, then you know you have a group of "science" cells you need to make, divide the size of the planet into the number of metrics to get the cells per type and then spread them out on the planets surface with a little noise so sometimes you do need to make a sacrifice.

Don't get me wrong, this is not unusual in a universal industry sense, and it hasn't been a significant burden but having cohesive planetary surfaces would be very good :)

In any event 77b with Altarians is a wonderful version, albeit with my xml double hull size and no limits on attachments mod which literally keeps me from losing focus and nodding off

 

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3,078 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Actually I think they should leave it as is. Otherwise good planets would be game-breaking instead of merely good. Is it frustrating to not have ideal tile placement? Perhaps, but there are also many improvements available over the game that provide, let's say, science adjacency. By the end of the game, your core worlds should be humming.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I'd say by midgame your core worlds should be humming, what's the point of reaching a crescendo if the game ends right there?  that'd be a weird strategy for creating "fun" :P

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Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting bradzoob, reply 2

I'd say by midgame...

Yeah I misspoke. It happens. In fact we shouldn't be afraid to delete improvements as the game progresses because there are often better alternatives available.

Reply #4 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Yeah if it wasn't such a chore i'd constantly delete and rebuild but i really don't want to delete anything at this stage because i have no idea what changes will happen if i do, in some cases i've deleted things and they never came back lol.  Like when you put down an orbital extraction sat then later decide it makes more sense to manually mine this super rare and suddenly required for everything resource - you hit the planet and you can't update the resource and if you delete the resource hoping it'll refresh it, it won't come back. I'm worried the wonders or achievement buildings won't come back and then i'll be sad and ragequit again, :P  I hate loss man, what can i say, it takes 40 hours to reach this stage i'm not losing my goddamn magic fairy building! lol

I guess that's an in-dev problem and not representative, but i digress.  The point is that you get more of a bonus by adjacency than any of the tile bonuses, and that's not a call to nerf the adjacency bonus or remove the world tile bonuses, it's a call to build coherent procedural world tiles so we can use them the way the game wants us to use them, at this point i can see how awesome the idea is but struggle to see the implementation rationale so i'm just guessing it's first draft random for now with maybe a stochastic randomizer for next tile being the same, but rather than using a scatter source expanding outward with high probability of diminishing it's using linear scanning from top left to bottom right.

 

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I think you can delete whatever you want but improvements (anything dragged over from the left side) cannot be replaced.

Reply #6 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

yeah that's what i was worried about, haha.