Planet generating algorithm and tier 4+ planets rant/suspicions

Edit: Everything here is my speculations based on what i saw/ read on forum.

As far as i know current automatic planet generation is based on how many players settled the planet?

I’m quite interested in how it is working with higher level planet like tier 5 and 6.
We have a lot of resources necessary for everyone on those tiers but only minimal number of people are building there because of how easy it is to move between worlds with portal and how frustrating is building on such high tier.
More and more of us will be going there for necessary stuff.

I’m a bit worried that algorithm will not create new high tier planets unless enough player build settlements there. If I and tone of other players go there and harvest resources for 2 hours vs other 5 spent on tier 1, will the algorithms ever decide that we have not enough of high tier planets?
Or is it under developers manual control?

As was stated in other thread, most of players prefer to build on tier 1 to 3 because we can manage it much easier - less hp per block, easier to deal with hostile mobs and no atmo skill required for all alts, on the other hand it is veeery easy to move through portals to get to tier 4+.

Edit2:
A bit of sources:

There is more but i will look it up after work.

Do you have a source for the existence of such an algorithm? I was under the impression that planets were dev-generated and that new planets would be added when they deemed it was time.

No, I don’t. There were discussions about automatic planet making algorithm by devs, without any kind of particulars.
Most of the above are my speculations based on how i saw universe behave and think would be easiest to do.

Edit: added disclaimers.

Were there? I don’t remember seeing those but my memory’s not what it used to be. Could you add a source so I could catch up on these discussions?

It won’t be trivial, so I will try in few hours when i get home.

Beside the ones I’ve already added to top post there was one more mention by developers when people where worried about release date and worlds being overused when devs will be sleeping. But right now i can’t find it.

The post by James is about world design being algorithmic, not world creation. The worlds are procedurally generated upon creation but the creation itself doesn’t appear to be based on how many players live on X world.

The second post you linked is by a player who themselves is lacking any sort of evidence.

We could call @Steggs101in to see if he has an answer but I’m sure he has better things to do.

I recall the same, the planets are generated automatically for certain events like population with home beacons on planets and such. The algorithm places the planet and selects the biomes and colors. They can also (of course) add them manually like they did before the patch to address planet full messages to try and disperse the players across more planets.

Edit: this was done to allow for planets to be generated even when the developers were not online. I am pretty sure it happened a few times during the initial launch when t1 and t2 planets just showed up a few times

Do you happen to have a link with that recall? Or @nevir/@Stretchious/@Havok40k I know you guys have fingers in different pies, have any of you heard of anything like this and have a link for where it was discussed previously?

It’s a hybrid system, where both automatic algorithms react to population thresholds and the devs can manually initiate the creation of new worlds. At least, that’s my understanding of it.

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They can certainly do it manually - I’m less clear on how automatic it is.

Pragmatically, as a software dev myself, I would expect it to be simpler than people are assuming here. There is definitely a set of statistics they collect per world (active players per world over time, etc), and maybe an automatic alarm to tell the devs to take a look at particularly crowded worlds—or at least someone that looks at those graphs regularly.

But it probably requires a dev to manually provision the world (there’s likely quite a few moving parts under the covers of each server—automating provisioning of all that can be quite a lot of work, probably isn’t worth the effort, and carries a lot of risk)

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tldr: I’m worried that independently of what makes decision to add new planet (devs or algorithm) deciding when to add new “resource” planet its very complex problem and in my opinion not adding new tier 5 planets is extremely safe/conservative move on dev side.

Actually, you touched fundamental thing i’m worried about.
I’ve been thinking for quite some time about it and when we come to this point, its irrelevant if the decision is automatic or manual, it all comes down to what type of statistics are collected.
And for resource gathering (and over-harvesting) it will be quite a hard problem imho.

One of more accurate solution I was able to think about would be to get snapshots regularly and check changes in player inventory when at the same time trying to guess what player goal is - so if he has a lot of diamonds and its going up - they its easy, he is mining for diamonds. But if he is mining and diamonds are not increasing? How to detect it? By how many rocks he has? Maybe he is mining for silver and gold? It gets tricky.

Also lets say we are talking about shimmering orbs. Now, when player has more and more shimmering orbs than fine, easy, he is gathering necessary plants.
But when he is just running and there is very small trickle of said orbs? Is he hunting or gathering?
It becomes complex very quickly. Than try building any kind of distribution for that.

On the other hand straightforward solution would be to check how number of resource is changing server wide and aggregate it by players to have a statistic how often they have increase of resource. But then you need to include how much was bought and/or how much was hoarded, used for crafting in the meantime etc.
Again complexity is going up really quickly.

Ok, I’m ranting. What i’m worried about is that its very tricky to get a feeling when some resources should be increased (and that would also include adding new planets with said resource). Imho at that moment devs would rather not add new planet unless they are extremely and totally sure that there is the need cause each server is costing them money. If in doubt, they take safe bet of not doing it. That is good and bad for us, cause it is responsible but if some resources are actually harvested to near extinction and its pain in the backside to get them, nothing can be done about it.

Actually imho its exactly the opposite. The more moving parts, the better it is to automate stuff. You are removing human error when deploying stuff - and that risk increase always with complexity. Horizontal scaling is a known and in many cases solved problem - and if they have db per server (i rather assume they have) its perfect for it. Not to mention time zones. Especially on the releases (PS4 and subsequent PC) and next few days, when USA would boomed I highly doubt devs would be online and checking those graphs looking for a moment when it is time to make new tier 1 planet. Or maybe i’m just lazy enough to make automation for such staff asap :stuck_out_tongue:

I can assure you, regen on those plents is fine. I am settled on Alcyon right now with my partner; we are the creators of the El Fuego settlement at rank #5 on the planet. The mines I dig underneath us and all of the soil and plants we have harvested on the surface seem to regenerate 100% overnight when we sleep. We have no worry of running out of stuff.

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Are you using 3x3 AOE hammers for several hours mining?

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I go to one spot on Alcyon, a desert two times a day (if I can) and harvest for about 15 minutes 100+ Exotic Earthyams from the cacti. Today, about 14:00 I gathered about 125, just hoping from one to other (i don’t even count all the desert swords and oort staves), I picked clean small area, but I picked it clean :wink: there were many more but, the area I choose was picked clean. After getting home and logging on again on about 9:00 the exactly same area I gathered 100+ more, but got killed by lag two times, so I gave up. Anyway, the place was regenerated for sure…

And now we go to tour of my mines… I have beaconed area with shelves deep underground (or deep in mountain, but high altitude in case of Cardass) on every T6 planet. My mines, and I mine tunnels only for duration of one persisting pie with gem 3x3 hammer, but afterwards pick them clean with titanium hammers, even digging out copper and the worst kind of coal… my mines sometimes do not regenerate for few days. I see no point in mining there more often than once a week, maybe twice, because it’s a waste of hammer, pie, and strength potion when you dig, only getting stone, and seeing random leftovers of old corridors, or even single empty blocks.

I’m not sure if it’s this topic, there are too many… but my statement is, that the “regeneration fix patch” did fix surface regeneration rate, but sure as hell nerfed ore regeneration rate. Was the nerf intentional or not… well… to be honest, looking at the state of the game now and right after the wipe it seems to me that it was intended nerf, but I wrote why I think They do that in other topics.

The problem is that when there is no human supervision, there’s no one to fix problems on the spot. In my company we ran several big servers (bare metal), and hundreds of small ones. Countless times there were problems on provider side. From giving machine (be it virtual or physical) with wrong OS installed, to an edge cases, like motherboard not working correctly with soft we’re using (don’t wanna go into details). Things like docker, kubernetes etc, may seem good from the outside, but when you use company that does the dirty work for you, you are overpaying, a lot, you pay for copper with gems :wink: And if you do it yourself, you need people that oversee things, and when unexpected happen, people who can and react accordingly

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Well, I’m doing my usual gathering of shimmering orbs. I’m on Basservona and moving through all usual spots (and actually i think most regions on the planet that spawn more than one or two mushrooms every 20 chunks) looking for glowing mushrooms. I find veeery few this time. Usually after 3-4 hours i should have way above hundred. Lately I’ve actually started checking atlas with shimmering orb cause i found all 40 or so. They were picked nearly clean and every spot i usually go for is empty. Its not the first time this happening and I know that if I happen to go after regen but before other gathering bees I would be able to get hell lot more. Unfortunately often i go after the bees (and i know i’m one of such bees) but before regen. And land is empty.

Diamonds are even funnier. I’m actually every time gathering missed stuff by other miners and making something between 30-50 an hour. Yeah, i don’t have right equipment right now, but the amount of resources i encounter along the way is small too comparing to a month or so ago.

Its not that regen is not working. Its working perfectly. I just have strong assurance that right now we have waves of “there are resources” and “barren land” every quater or half the day or so. Not sure about the exac period.

Well, lets agree to disagree :slight_smile: Our experience are opposite. I would be more than happy to talk shop with you, but this is not the place for it.

Nah, I am a minimalist. I use a Stone Chisel to prospect tunnels before I dig them and then Iron Hammer my way directly to resources I find. One trip through my three mines will net me a littoe more than 100 Iron, Silver, and Gold each, around 60ish Titanium, lots 9f coal, and 30-40 Diamonds or Rubies (depending on whether I mine under the deset areas ir not).

Maybe my mines regen fast because I am not plowing thick tunnels everywhere? My corridors are usually only two blocks thick.

Yeah, I think that’s the reason, at least, what I read other people post is that the tunnels they see still standing are the 3x3 tunnels.

Regen is based on how many blocks in a “Chunk” however large that is, have been destroyed, so the more destroyed the slower the regen.

I will say this is unique to Alcyon. I did the same thing on Serpensarindi and I never saw any of my digging regenerate there. I chalked that up to traffic, though, cause people were always running through.