Bushes (and possibly trees) spread?

Coolthulhu · 2017-09-28T16:35:11.000Z

Squaggly Maggleton:

Honestly, it would probably be realistic if it doesn’t change much in 8 seasons

Then it’s not really worth working on, considering that average game doesn’t last half that long.

EpsilonShadow · 2017-09-28T17:06:08.000Z

How about some blob infestation that make fast growing killer woods?

DemAvalon · 2017-09-28T17:13:27.000Z

EpsilonShadow:

How about some blob infestation that make fast growing killer woods?

those are called triffid groves and are already in the game.

Umbra_Vorago · 2017-09-28T18:25:59.000Z

Sure, not as many people live long enough to see 8 seasons pass, but a lot of characters DO live to that point and beyond. I don’t think it should be written off as “not worth it” considering there are still a considerable amount of players who can and do reach that stage.

Realism realism, that’s something that gets brought up a lot and this would be a nice realistic addition, so I’d rather it not get shoved under the rug.
However if someone would like to expand the lore and say that the apocalypse/blob/infections/weather/whatever make it so natural plant life can’t support new plant life very easily without being tended to, then I wouldn’t mind it being swept under. So long as an in-game lore reason is given.

But like I said, there are still a lot of players who make it to that point and beyond, it’d be a nice addition for those who do live longer lives.

kevin.granade · 2017-09-28T19:51:50.000Z

One peak growing season is plenty to see some significant movement in particularly fast-growing plants.
What you’re going to see are weeds, grasses, and vines going crazy, normally they’re constantly suppressed to keep them from damaging structures, and they’re also held back by regular traffic (vehicular or pedestrian).

Short-term grasses are going to grow taller and spread across bare soil, and some isolated hard surfaces are going to have grass break through them. Meanwhile vines will start growing up the sides of houses and walls, and in some cases growing into the houses themselves.

The problem is none of that is particularly dramatic, none of those features are large enough to change the properties of the affected terrain, just the descriptions.

Bushes aren’t going to multiply very quickly, but they are going to get significantly thicker in a relatively short amount of time.

I’m skeptical that we would want to bother with tree growth at all, you’re going to see some minor changes over the course of several years, but for really dramatic changes it’s going to take more like 10 years. The most I’d expect to see is some saplings appear over the course of each year.

We might just have something that adjusts the descriptions, and possibly the displayed character or tile of a feature that gets applied over time. This would get us an overall sense of growth and decay without having to track the state of every tile. It would also handle it in a way that lets us roll back the clock when we start a new character, so the 5th character in a world doesn’t run across overgrowth everywhere.

Squaggly_Maggleton · 2017-09-29T05:04:19.000Z

That seems like a good way to handle part of it, but I think it would get noticeably harder to drive through grass and bushes as they grow IRL. It’s kinda reasonable to drive 80mph through well kept grass in a straight line, but if that grass turns into hay it’ll be much more difficult. A bush in the middle of a field will get quite a bit bigger after a year or two, and if you crash into it at high speeds it would definitely leave a mark.

If you’re thinking about tracking the age of the save and applying visual changes to individual types of tiles all at once, maybe tie in some sort of “difficulty driving” change when the visual change happens? Hay bogging you down and large bushes actually damaging your vehicle a decent amount could really emphasize the importance of roads, and make clearing well-traveled routes a better option compared to just going around a block time after time.

If implemented, this would make wilderness bases harder to access, so some sort of quick way to reduce a tile to dirt would be needed (we can already use the construction menu, but going tile to tile for any sort of distance is ridiculous). Maybe make a vehicle part that comes from salt trucks, the kind that keeps the road from freezing in the winter. It could be loaded with salt and, when activated, make grass tiles under it turn into dirt tiles to create dirt roads quickly.

Zhilkin · 2017-09-29T09:44:48.000Z

Please check this Lua-mod: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jd18xbdiwifrrtw/ZSLua_ForestGrowth.zip?dl=0

Once a minute a lua function is called which transforms terrain in a donught shape (with 2/24 tiles min/max radius) around a player.

Terrain evolves in high rates:

dirt to grass (1/4 probability);
grass to shrub (1/8 probability);
shrub to tree (1/16 probability).

Also terrain degenerates in lower rates:

grass to dirt (1/16 probability);
bush to grass (1/32 probability);
tree to bush (1/64 probability).

You can check animated gif (warning! ~8 megabytes) here: https://imgur.com/a/hDRej

Is that what you wanted?

Squaggly_Maggleton · 2017-09-30T05:01:11.000Z

Ok that’s hilarious, thank you. Imma definitely start a game with that mod active. I love that’s it’s easy to tweak the mod to something more reasonable for when I get tired of being an African fertility god.

Is there some way to make terrain in newly generated tiles be more populated with bushes/trees to scale with the growth around you? Something like:
first season day 1: normal terrain population
third season day 1: something like the end of your gif

For the numbers you have in play it’s not really needed, but this might already be something I use permanently once I tweak the numbers to be less fun. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, I really appreciate this and it’s awesome already, thank you again!

Zhilkin · 2017-09-30T06:08:52.000Z

I beleive it is possible.

One can move forest, forest_thick, forest_river and field terrains to json and add link to lua script which will grow more or less vegetation depending on season.

Otherwise one can change mapgen functions in cpp with season-dependent changes.

github.com

CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/src/mapgen_functions.cpp#L460


    forest_chance += dat.w_fac - i;
    num++;
}
if (num > 0) {
    forest_chance /= num;
}
int rn = rng(0, forest_chance);
if ((forest_chance > 0 && rn > 13) || one_in(100 - forest_chance)) {
    std::array<std::pair<int, ter_id>, 15> tree_chances = {{
            // todo: JSONize this array!
            // Ensure that these one_in chances
            // (besides the last) don't add up to more than 1 in 1
            // Reserve the last one (1 in 1) for simple trees that fill up the rest.
            { 250, t_tree_apple },
            { 300, t_tree_pear },
            { 300, t_tree_cherry },
            { 350, t_tree_apricot },
            { 350, t_tree_peach },
            { 350, t_tree_plum },
            { 256, t_tree_birch },
            { 256, t_tree_willow },

github.com

CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/src/mapgen_functions.cpp#L511


                m->ter_set(i, j, t_shrub_blueberry);
            } else {
                m->ter_set(i, j, t_underbrush);
            }
        } else {
            m->ter_set(i, j, dat.groundcover());
        }
    }
}
m->place_items("forest", 60, 0, 0, SEEX * 2 - 1, SEEY * 2 - 1, true, turn); // fixme: region settings


if (terrain_type == "forest_water") {
    // Reset *_fac to handle where to place water
    for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
        if (dat.t_nesw[i] == "forest_water") {
            dat.set_dir(i, 2);
        } else if (is_ot_type("river", dat.t_nesw[i])) {
            dat.set_dir(i, 3);
        } else if (dat.t_nesw[i] == "forest" || dat.t_nesw[i] == "forest_thick") {
            dat.set_dir(i, 1);
        } else {

Coolthulhu · 2017-09-30T08:03:05.000Z

[quote=“Zhilkin, post:13, topic:14307”]Terrain evolves in high rates:
Also terrain degenerates in lower rates:[/quote]

That demonstrates the problem I was talking about: jungle everywhere.
And lowering the rates not only wouldn’t fix it, it would only cause the problem to occur later, while most games would see no changes.

For plant growth to be implemented well, we’d need something more overmap oriented.
For example, add a field like map of plant_type->count to each overmap tile. Then, once every x minutes, for every single tile in current overmap, increase or decrease this number based on some set of rules.
This set of rules could be adjusted to avoid ultrathick forests (just a cap per overmap tile), allow forests to spread from their edges instead of just popping in from dirt fields, depend on the season, depend on proximity to weird tiles (waste dump = everything dies, swamp = grow fast but with a cap, house = grow slower, road = don’t grow unless surrounded by thick forest, triffids = allow thicker forests), even allow conversions from one plant type to another (adjacent fungal tiles = more fungals less non-fungals).
The overmap tiles could be adjusted based on that too. For example, a field that gains a specific number of trees turns into a forest. A forest that loses enough trees turns into a field. A forest that gets fungalized becomes “fungal forest”.
Conversion from overmap tree count (abstract) to trees on map (“real”) would be done in map post-processing step, where shit like plants maturing and funnels filling happens. Conversion back would be done on map saving, map unloading, or possibly even just changing a map tile in the game.

Umbra_Vorago · 2017-09-30T12:08:44.000Z

All the technical stuff and coding goes straight over my head.

So long as plant growth is implemented, even if it takes many seasons to show any results, I’d be happy. I’ve never liked the idea that trees/plants don’t regrow without a lore given reason.

Sneaky_Potato · 2017-10-05T22:29:47.000Z

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:4, topic:14307”]The performance is not a problem.
The problem would be designing it so that it doesn’t result in one of:

[ul][li]Jungle everywhere in short time[/li]
[li]Barely anything changing unless you play for 8+ seasons[/li][/ul][/quote]

Jumanji: Dark Days Ahead.

that would be the definition

Zhilkin · 2017-10-06T15:56:48.000Z

[quote=“Sneaky Potato, post:18, topic:14307”][quote=“Coolthulhu, post:4, topic:14307”]The performance is not a problem.
The problem would be designing it so that it doesn’t result in one of:

[ul][li]Jungle everywhere in short time[/li]
[li]Barely anything changing unless you play for 8+ seasons[/li][/ul][/quote]

Jumanji: Dark Days Ahead.

that would be the definition[/quote]
Jumanji: Only Trees Ahead

hobophobe · 2018-03-15T21:53:57.666Z

As Kevin already mentioned, it only takes about a year for plant life to start reclaiming human development. Just being able to see signs of this after the first year without any effect on gameplay would be a great boost for immersion, and IMO would make an excellent little reward for making it through a full year.

I think one thing that is missing from this game though is tall grass, which is something you would definitely start to see a lot of in the apocalypse. Here is something which can have very interesting effects on gameplay, suddenly zombie children, crawlers, ants and spiders are all much harder to see until they get close.

darktoes · 2018-03-17T07:38:24.646Z

Yeah I’d be interested to see the effects of larger/more bushes and grass on stealth. It would help dampen noises and make it harder to see things at a distance, which could make things very interesting. Ivy might also have interesting effects since it can essentially block out a window if enough grows. You might even argue that it strengthens things it grows on (or weakens them, in some cases.)

I’d like to see fields and forests stay fields and forests (most of them weren’t being maintained in any way before the Cataclysm anyway) but grass growing and occasional tree respawns wouldn’t be bad for adding a sense of the movement of time. Vegetation in towns would make access to materials a little easier and would make things a big more dangerous late-game. You could even make grass tiles flammable in summer, so big areas of dry grass could be burnt to produce flat areas for hunting, killzones, etc.

I think growable fruit trees/bushes would be really nice. Make them take a year to grow, but having access to semi-regular fruit would be really nice without all the replanting nonsense.

pikolinian · 2018-03-27T17:40:00.464Z

I’m newbie here, my best character survived half year, but…
I think that detoriation of human-build stuff would have better effect. sorry if already in game, but after year-two side of roads should be dirt/grass, fallen tree here or there, small tree could spring from wrecked car… for building some wall could be missing (wild animal? fallen tree?), with bit of grass inside… That would be more sad, more striking effect than bit larger forest…

hobophobe · 2018-03-27T21:19:17.858Z

Forest expansion would probably take at least a decade before any really noticeable signs start to appear, so there’s not much point in trying to code it. Plants and weeds growing all over every town happens much quicker though, like you described with grass starting to encroach into sidewalks and roadways very quickly.

psyxypher · 2018-03-28T02:49:44.682Z

Related to this is fuel denaturing over time. Eventually, all that fuel you find is going to expire, meaning it gets harder and harder to go all Mad Max.

Also related, I’ve heard that among Doomsday Preppers and the like, Diesel Engines are really popular because of Biodiesel.

Anyway, if anything like this gets coded in, I suggest looking at the series “Life After People” for inspiration. It essentially deals with the scenario of what’d happen if all the humans on Earth disappeared, which is close enough to the Cataclysm for reference, IMO.

NuG · 2018-03-28T17:25:40.088Z

psyxypher:

Anyway, if anything like this gets coded in, I suggest looking at the series “Life After People” for inspiration.

I was going to say this as well, but forgot what the show was called. It basically showed that after 10-20 years things would be crazy overgrown and like 100 or 500 years there would be almost no trace of cities, as it would just look like a jungle… or something like that. We don’t really build stuff to last in this day and age, and things would deteriorate pretty quickly without anyone doing upkeep on it.
Though in CDDA you don’t really last for more than a couple years, or at least I usually start a new character after 3 years of 90 days seasons, but that’s because I get bored of being too OP and/or the game ends up having too many errors.

pikolinian · 2018-03-28T18:23:54.970Z

I think a good approximation would be Chernobyl city and larger Pripyat, both abandoned since disaster, well, 30 years ago. If you see recent videos from you-tube - not very impressive