If it really takes place in New England

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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I live in New England, and I loved finding out that my favorite game takes place here, but it just doesn’t hit me with the “New England” vibe.

If you really want things to be true-to-life, building gen for towns should be clustered around/branching out from rivers.
Some shops in residential areas, but most of the buildings should be houses.
Strip malls along all the high ways, with just straight up forest almost everywhere else.

It’s also really mountainous around here, and Cataclysm is understandably very flat.
solution-Even just like, a heatmap could simulate New England altitude. It could gradually get colder and more arid the further you “walk up” a “mountain” (could also help make trees/plants generate more naturally).
The centers of those cold “mountain” regions could have radio towers on “top” (in the middle), because that’s where we put those.
Fire lookout stations and weather centers too.

Also, I don’t know about you guys, but I would love to walk too far East and find a bigass beach/ocean
completely blocking progress without a boat (we also have a fuckton of creepy little islands with lighthouses and ghosts and shit around here).

There are a lot of cool ocean things that are pretty significant here in New England.
We have old, run-down military bases all along the coast, relics from like WW1.
Doughnut shops, sea food places, historic communities, vibrant shipyards, tremendous scrap piles, tacky thrift stores,
and everything is made of bricks and granite and concrete older than this country.

There’s so much about New England that is just too much a part of itself to be forgotten any time soon.
I guarantee my description will still fit in the 2040s.

New England is one of the creepiest places in the world, and it is totally worth working that into the game.

Last thing I’ll say.
This game needs fog.

1 Like
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Part of it is that the way cities and highways, streets, etc is generated would need to be reworked a tad, and not many suggestions have come up for how to implement that, codewise. Making the city planning more realistic would require figuring out what exactly we have in mind, and how to get the worldgen to reliably spit out cities resembling what we have in mind.

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A lot of these are things I have planned once I am satisfied with the building editor (and when the z-levels are in an acceptable enough place to begin working on things like mountains).

Working on things like oceans is going to be a bit more difficult. To get it right, we really need a reasonable approximation of latitude and longitude for each overmap and then work on expanding that around.

As for the shops and materials and things, a lot of that is just mapgen (http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=11257.0)

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Agreed.

One thing I’ve noticed though, is it seems like all towns are linked by winding country roads, which gives more of a “hill country” vibe than what might be expected. Granted, unsure how small-town New England is laid out compared to other regions of the country, but it is a bit odd that I’ve NEVER seen a highway generate. Have they been dummied out maybe?

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Having roads literally branch from rivers with a gradient density into the rest of the gameworld could work.
It’s too cold around here to have all the weird-little-separate-communities-in-the-middle-of-fields that Cataclysm has.
Our towns are big and next to water, with a few creepy villages in the woods.

There’s got to be a pretty straightforward way to make things generate more convincingly.
I could categorize a list of every in-game structure and how close it should generate to a body of water.
Something like that would make Cataclysm feel a lot more organic and logical.

Also, as for how oceans could generate…
Maybe instead of setting up latitude and longitude, the player just always spawns nearish to the seacoast?
That’s where they’re statistically likely to be anyway, and it would give incentive to flee to the woods for safety from the biggest hordes.
The Beach biome acts as a wall, ocean can never generate past it, but ocean otherwise generates everywhere, which means it would extend forever everywhere to the left of the spawn area.
I’m picturing like a full map-screen worth of seacoast biome, to roughly match scale.

Edit:
We also definitely need a couple big highways, they’re usually like ten miles from the seacoast.

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Now if only these concepts, along with weather patterns, could be adapted into parameters that could be adjusted to make worldgen results resembling other regions.

That would likely be a tad ambitious though.

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The default mapgen works nicely as like, the midwest.

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Ah, I see. Still, needs more highways. >.>

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[quote=“chimpdroid, post:5, topic:10730”]There’s got to be a pretty straightforward way to make things generate more convincingly.
I could categorize a list of every in-game structure and how close it should generate to a body of water.
Something like that would make Cataclysm feel a lot more organic and logical.[/quote]
Nothing is ever as straightforward as it sounds. Having cities placed near to rivers is easy enough though.

Also, as for how oceans could generate... Maybe instead of setting up latitude and longitude, the player just always spawns nearish to the seacoast? That's where they're statistically likely to be anyway, and it would give incentive to flee to the woods for safety from the biggest hordes. The Beach biome acts as a wall, ocean can never generate past it, but ocean otherwise generates everywhere, which means it would extend forever everywhere to the left of the spawn area. I'm picturing like a full map-screen worth of seacoast biome, to roughly match scale.
Approximating latitude and longitudes would help to blend into different biomes over time, not just the ocean, it helps to randomize things up a little bit, and it could eventually be used to start in different regions.
We also definitely need a couple big highways, they're usually like ten miles from the seacoast.
We had highways before, but they generated oddly (only appeared when 2 roads spawned adjacent), and they look very strange since they only go north-south or east-west. Some highway mapgens and a nice way to align 2-wide line drawing features would be nice, but it is going to take some work.
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I live in New Hampshire, and its pretty hilly here, they really nailed it on the feeling of walking through the woods here, having to constantly climb over and around something every step. But mapgen really dropped the ball on hills. The best hill system I can think of for Cataclysm is just jacking what Dwarf Fortress has going on, but making things more visible so that guy 2 feet up the incline from you, you can still see.

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That’s easier said than done, handling smoothly changing elevations without losing the elevation information is going to be extremely difficult.
It might be that we need to “flatten” what gets drawn as long as it’s continuous, and have a toggleable elevation view you can use to check for inclines.

“Dropped the ball” is a pretty weird thing to say, mapgen isn’t “playing the game” in the first place.

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I didn’t know that mapgen was a juggler anyway. o3o

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I hate how dwarf fortress looks, but I love the looks we’ve already got going on, so I don’t think altitude should
effect visibility, at least not at close range.

Altitude can be generated as an invisible terrain layer.
(i.e,
fence post
dirt
altitude: 7)

The right fractal biz could make really realistic flowing hills that wouldn’t look like a whole lot in-game,
but having that extra element of shape and world-gen altitude requirements would make for much more diverse terrain.

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Are you talking about using elevation solely to approximate temperature/snowiness/wildlife/etc? If so, I don’t think that is worth implementing as opposed to an actual system that goes up and down. And unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do to display height information in a top down 2D display. TwbT for dwarf fortress actually helps a bit with it greying out details of different z levels, and something like that might be possible for cataclysm, but it probably would not play well with the console version.

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Living in this particular region of the country, it’s weird seeing such homogeneous terrain.

I don’t want it to look/play differently, I just want a more diversified world gen, and accounting for
altitude would make it easier to do so than making, like, new biomes.
Because that would eventually get tired; having more conifers higher up, tiny brooks cutting through
low-altitude sections of land, flowers clustered in little meadows…

I just want more varied land to explore.
Also, dirt roads cutting through the woods.
Plz.
They’re literally everywhere up here.

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You know, I’ve been playing a map with the town size set to 1, and the roads are pretty damn well connected. Maybe the weirdness in mapgen is caused by collisions from town gen itself?