Private Planet ReBuild Option

[Apt]

maybe when you order a new planet, you could get 3-4 different new maps to cycle through, try the colors and then pick one

[Clexarews]

Agreed. As far as we know, world generation is currently a manual process done by the devs. If there was a UI in place then I’d be all for this but in the functionality’s current implementation it seems like this could take a lot of dev time.

[Kirinvar]

Planets are like pancakes, the first one is rarely good.
So I guess this would be a much needed addition.

[majorvex]

We don’t have all the details yet, so maybe there will be some type of terrain selection option (one they can add more options to later?)

[Xaldafax]

@Nightstar

Yes I don’t think re-rolling for colors was what @Xaldafax was trying to get at.

I also raised this point early on. If a planet is something I decide to budget for, I don’t want to have a planet that I don’t like, in terms of terrain. There’s a line between perfect and just pleasant, I realize with a random gen but there could be major issues.

Yeah I am more worried about the terrain and look over the colors. I didn’t see the color setting in testing yet but that isn’t my main point. I do still feel people should be happy with the planet across the board and an easy “rebuild” option should not hurt too much.

I think mostly James was concerned because of the wait people might have to endure on the rebuild. (builds aren’t like instant and everything since there are many layers). I told him that should be fine because people ASKED for it. But I forget the exact details around the last talk about private planets.

[KKBell]

@KKBell

The primary “Node” in the World generator is what the color options plug into. On this same “Node” are slider gauges. One controls the biome noise, or how scrambled things are and one controls the biome size, which to me almost has an effect on how sharp the individual biomes are. Since these are all in the same “Node”, I wonder how hard it could be to add them to the same interface used to select color?

To me this seems like it would be easy to implement? It wouldn’t give a complete re-roll, but might make a world feel a bit better.

[Nightstar]

@Xaldafax

I think mostly James was concerned because of the wait people might have to endure on the rebuild. (builds aren’t like instant and everything since there are many layers). I told him that should be fine because people ASKED for it.

Right I would rather wait even if it’s 72 - 96 hours for regeneration than rent a planet I’m unhappy with for a month before trying again.

EDIT:

@KKBell Yeah I would love it if we could specify some of those selections up front. Also I’m not sure if percentage of surface area that is water is a ‘slider’ type selection or not.

[Xaldafax]

@Nightstar

Right I would rather wait even if it’s 72 - 96 hours for regeneration than rent a planet I’m unhappy with for a month before trying again.

That is why I did this. For me I don’t want to risk a paid planet for a single roll of the RNG dice and be stuck with it. I feel many others wouldn’t like that as well and it would actually get us more bad reviews. A simple disclaimer that rebuilds take time or whatever at least allows people to decide.

[KKBell]

Water is set for 3 levels i think, also you can turn on lava in place of water.

[Clexarews]

Note: this is not true per Luca’s post below.

The devs don’t use world builder for their worlds though per something Ross shared a bit ago. I can provide a link if needed once im back at my computer.

[Spendra]

How much backlog time would be possible though?

If this feature proves popular enough, it could be like the states currently dealing with unemployment crisis and taking 17 weeks to get sorted due to overwhelming demand and limited skilled claims adjusters. Seems quite possible we might see something similar in regards to dev time and planet handling/manicuring time.

If that is going to be the case, then it needs to be made very clear up front what potential wait times could be.(i see you addressed this somewhat in a later post - definitely imperative that people are made aware as you suggest) People asking and expecting one thing without realizing the potential fallout in regards to others things isn’t the same thing. As long as the players are educated on the ramifications that type of detailed handling involves, then sure, let there be a backburner of planets to get to.

but then how do they decide who gets dealt with first? Is it in order of planet generation? Does the player keep priority until the world is gotten just right, or does the player skip back to the queue if they don’t like the 2nd rebuild?

[KKBell]

Hmm. Didn’t know that. I wonder if their generator follows any of the World builder rules?

[lucadeltodecso]

All the worlds are generated by the world builder

[Nightstar]

Luca can you tell us if it’s possible to “push a button” and have a world rebuilt using the same profile with no dev/admin intervention?

I realize a GUI for the command would have to be added but are we talking about extensive development vs. manual intervention, or is this something that could basically be “enabled”?

I mean, if it’s not an NDA violation

[Clexarews]

Well this is excellent information. I misunderstood what Ross wrote here.

[Clexarews]

Within the world builder itself it’s as simple as changing the seed. You can keep quite a few things (colors, prefabs, decorations, etc.) constant while just changing the seed.

I think Ross describes it well here.

[Nightstar]

@Clexarews

I think Ross describes it well here .

Sure, sorry if I was unclear.

I’m wondering if the world server can do this (regenerate from the same seed and come up with different terrain details) or if it would have to be regenerated manually in another environment.

Xalda posted a range of poll options but I would be happy to see the world regenerated from scratch, even with no changed settings, but different terrain. As a minimalist approach to the issue at hand - this would be great and help to address the largest question I’ve had since the announcement.

Ideally, of course, it would be nice to be able to ‘adjust the sliders’ for your world but that level of customization isn’t even currently on the table.

[Clexarews]

By terrain do you mean the top layer of clay/peaty/silty that covers the world? Or are you talking about the actual shape of the mountains and hills and valleys, etc.?

For the former, yes this is possible. Keep the seed the same and change the strata config and you can get a hill that was covered in silty covered in peaty.

For the latter no. That’s the entire point of the seed, to control the randomization. If you use the same seed within the various noises the noise randomization will always been the same.

If you open up world builder (or check out my video series) you can see that they actually do some really cool things with this within the different dev-provided configs. This post of mine kind is a “basic” example that took me a hot minute to figure out

[Xaldafax]

@Spendra

If this feature proves popular enough, it could be like the states currently dealing with unemployment crisis and taking 17 weeks to get sorted due to overwhelming demand and limited skilled claims adjusters. Seems quite possible we might see something similar in regards to dev time and planet handling/manicuring time.

Honestly I am not sure and would leave it up to James and the team. I’ve dealt enough with them around development, timing, and how they approach things to trust that they would make the best decisions considering the technical and work effort behind it.

My job here was to mostly bring up the point so they do see how important “liking the planet you get” is to everyone instead of just a side comment I had with him during a chat. In the end they will do what they think is best based on the overall roadmap and work efforts they have for this and other upcoming features. I just know they don’t like to go back right away and tweak things so it could be a while before they come back to revise this.

[Xaldafax]

@Clexarews

By terrain do you mean the top layer of clay/peaty/silty that covers the world? Or are you talking about the actual shape of the mountains and hills and valleys, etc.?

For me I’d like all… the look and feel. Ultimately I would need more technical details and haven’t had the chance to really get into it so we know how easy or hard it is.