smaller World/Globe

[SpaceDorf]

Half Filled Globes look crappy and I feel like I am keeping myself away from something.
And it just don't feels like a true world.

Instead I think it would be better to make the globe smaller, or hexes bigger .. so worldsize is still an acceptable way to
optimize the game for slower cpus .. but at least it looks complete.

[Bakar]

Or we could add things like horses and other sorts of transporatations which make travelling faster and a reason to travel to other parts of the world.
For example: An outlander outpost told you about an abandoned base filled with loot,food and tamed animals (like cows and chickens)
This could make travelling to other parts of the world worth it.

[SpaceDorf]

Yeah we could ..

but the suggestions is not about travel speed, but about processor speed and the worldgen.

The thought behind it :
30% painted globe looks like shit ... smaller globe 100% painted looks better.

[Bakar]

True

[NeverPire]

It will lead to a choice of different hexes reduced.

With the actual process which cover one third of a planet if you go from the north pole to the south pole, you will meet (I imagine 100) rows of hexes.
Each row has its own variation of temperature.

With a full planet covered with the same number of hexes, you will have less rows between poles (let's said 30) so less shades between hexes.

I hope I have been clear but it's not easy to explain.
Let' try again ; hexes situated in the same latitude are similar so it's the number of row (latitude) available which determine the variety of hexes.

[Bakar]

We could have a choice when we generate the world.
For example we can coose the world size so we should also change globe size.

[SpaceDorf]

I admit you are right.

the temperature steps between rows on a smaller globe will be higher.

[Wanderer_joins]

Travel times on a road in desert/ arid shrublands are already ridiculously short, you can go half way around the globe in two quadrums.

[SpaceDorf]

if there is a globe 

which again, is the whole point of the discussion.

[Dannyrulx]

Imagine going full on cowboy. Herding massive amounts of muffalos, whilst only wearing alpaca wool dusters and cowboy hats, with cloth t-shirts and pants, armed with bolt action rifles.

[{insert_name_here}]

if there is a globe 

which again, is the whole point of the discussion.

I agree. It doesn't make sense for a world to only be covered with 30% land and rest is just vast, empty ocean. Maybe if boats were added and there were a few islands it would be interesting, but it makes sense to me if every world had 100% globe coverage but an adjustable size.

[Onasaki]

I'd definately like to see some kind of adjustment to the world size, not for a thematic or gameplay aesthetic but from a performance point of view.

I've run across to several crashes in a row, running on a very low-end PC that can run the game just fine normally. Though with the addition of mods things get a bit more hefty, and slower to load. (I think it's mostly just the mods though, and it's mostly physical memory stuff which can be remedied by upgrading my RAM or computer, which I'm working on.)

But I think that if we could have a much smaller size globe (maybe about three times smaller then the base one) and a landmass about a quarter of the size of default, I feel that worldbuilding would be a lot faster on slower computers. I mean, you get the smaller size, which means more things are closer together, so more animations are probably hitting off together, but the drop in framerate is worth the slower, and less bulky generation times (though I'm not quite sure how that all works). This might also mean factions can rise and fall, as wars pick up between hostile sects.

Could make it another globe setting, lower then 30%, 25%, 10%, hell, go as low as 5% and we might have a scattering of large islands which makes the boat idea above even more plausible and useful.

EDIT TO ADD: While I face these crashes I mentioned regularly, I have gotten the game to work by tweaking the world settings prior to generation for new colonies. Which is why I'm on board with the idea to shrink the world.

[Oblitus]

Well, here are some globe experiments.

Vanilla globe:


Globe with 30% of vanilla surface area:

Note, due to how tile generator works, it is very crude approximation. It has ≈65000 tiles, while 30% default map has ≈120000 tiles, but next generator step will give ≈197000 tiles on 100% coverage, and limiting coverage to 50% kinda kills the point. Tile count is always around 3^N value.

Size comparation:

[Oblitus]

Aaaand...



But here is a problem - planet surface is not actually saved. It is generated anew every time. And I have no idea where and how to store this since it should be loaded quite early in load process. Currently saving as global mod setting, but mismatch causes problems.

[SpaceDorf]

you are a genius.

what causes the mismatch ?
or do you have to force the size override everytime the planet surface is createt ?

( i guess everytime after loading, when you first open the map screen ? )