Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Surma]

After modding in a couple new species of fauna, I noticed that I made an error in one one of them. Of course, I only noticed this after having the world generator go on for about 250 cycles. And so I thought "Why not have a 'world generation log'?"

For each newly created region a log using that regions 'randomized' name (The Everseeing Land, etc..) would be created. In this text file would be a counter (the cycle number) as a header, with the reason for the regions rejection beneath.

For me at least, this may have let me debug the raw without having to go through 250+ rejections.

Just a thought.  

[Lightning4]

Importing Elephants...
Failed.
Reason: Not enough elephants.

Though realistically, I don't think an error in modding will cause a world to not generate. It's really only a matter of luck. Some worlds might not generate until the late 200's, some might generate instantly.

But it still makes me wonder why they fail in the first place.
It seems like there's a base line for a world to fulfill and if it fails, it dumps it and generates a new one. Probably to keep stuff like total ocean or glacier worlds from happening, or if there's a severe lack of biomes or something.

[JT]

The worlds are abandoned if they don't have a fairly even mix of plains, forests, mountains, and oceans, or if their various data layers produce strange results.

Toady has since specified that he is considering allowing people to avoid abandoning these worlds, since unusual worlds would then be interesting by nature of their uniqueness.

[Fishersalwaysdie]

My first world was generated from the second try.
I am still surprised.

[mickel]

It'd be interesting to see a reason given though. Well, at least for the helplessly curious among us.  

[Toady One]

I had a rejection logger sitting around for debug, so I've made it an init option now.  The modding error wouldn't lead to rejections though, unless you were fiddling with entity definitions.

[mickel]

I figured Toady would have something like that sitting around for use in debugging.

I imagine most cheat codes in computer games start out as debugging tools as well, that simply are left enabled or are re-enabled at some point.

[JT]

Generally.  Sometimes devs like to make up cheat codes just for fun, though.  For instance, the "Riot" cheat code for Grand Theft Auto 3 gave all citizens in the games weapons (including rocket launchers, machine guns, you name it) and made them all attack targets randomly.  When you disable police officers, it's freaking fun to play in one of those scenarios for a short while, though of course it grows boring eventually.

Or the hover cars in Vice City, although that may have been added because drowning was still a guaranteed Error 14 (unavoidable certain death) and the developers got sick of it.  At least in San Andreas the PC finally learned how to swim...