Visible random world seed (and being able to change it)

Started by stigma, October 25, 2013, 02:44:14 PM

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stigma

Hey all,

This is a really simple suggestion because it is basically the exact same as in other games. Minecraft is a good example.

I assume that the world is semi-randomly/procedurally generated. This means that there is some sort of random seed that it works from to construct the world. Let us see the random world seed so that we can recreate and share interesting worlds with other players.

This should be fairly easy to code since it just exposes something that already exists to the player, so it should just be a fairly minor change in the UI. It let's players who want to try something else but do it on the same world do so, and also creates nice community interactions in terms of "challanges" on especially hard world seeds, and you can even suggest some newbie-friendly map seeds to beginners who find the game hard to start with ect.

All in all I think this would add a lot to the game and expand player choice without requiring a lot of work. Win-win! :)

-Stigma

Tynan

Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Gazz

And if you let players enter the seed, make it an alphanumeric seed, not just a number.

Letters+numbers are just a base 36 number that can easily be converted to decimal for internal use.

And if players want to exchange seeds (or only talk about them) then "Mud" is far more catchy than 17608.

You could play in a world created by your dog! (or it's name anyway)

stigma

Quote from: Gazz on October 25, 2013, 03:08:11 PM
And if you let players enter the seed, make it an alphanumeric seed, not just a number.

Letters+numbers are just a base 36 number that can easily be converted to decimal for internal use.

And if players want to exchange seeds (or only talk about them) then "Mud" is far more catchy than 17608.

You could play in a world created by your dog! (or it's name anyway)

Agreed - it's a very minor thing that "shouldn't matter because it's the same anyway" but it makes the whole thing a lot more human and catchy. It's easy to remember that the seed "pizza" was one that was very defensible and that you can suggest/recommend, rather than "509423990234235" which you definitely have to make an effort to record somewhere if you actually want to make use of it at a later time.

Fairly simple stuff to code the conversions too I should think. I'm only a novice coder, but even I should be able to handle that fairly easily - which probably means that a real codemonkey considers it trivial =P I would not be surprised if there exists copright-free code that does that sort of conversion too considering how generalized that sort of operation is, which would make it largely a copypasta job.

-Stigma

Tynan

Quote from: Gazz on October 25, 2013, 03:08:11 PM
And if you let players enter the seed, make it an alphanumeric seed, not just a number.

Letters+numbers are just a base 36 number that can easily be converted to decimal for internal use.

And if players want to exchange seeds (or only talk about them) then "Mud" is far more catchy than 17608.

You could play in a world created by your dog! (or it's name anyway)

That's a really cool idea.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Gazz

It dates all the way back to Populous 1. =P

Since base 36 (or 26, whatever) strings produce huge integers quickly, you may have to cap the seed number eventually... but it doesn't really matter because it's a number anyway.
("Mudball2" already breaks the 32 bit barrier)

Spike

Gnomoria is another one that does this, plus I think you have an option for map sizes (which are not just a smaller segment of the same seed/map).