Hey, I thought it would be cool to discuss some ideas for planet generation, and also problems that occur right now or later in the game. I know there will come more features, but I dont know exactly what there will come. A first notation is: I cannot make 100% desert planets without water. If I do so, the planet is more like a mountain planet instead of desert biome. This should be changed imo. (Right now all earth type planet settings seem to get mountain planets if you have zero water). Then the plateaus we have in desert biome: It would be awesome I think, if those would be big like subcontinents from time to time. Right now, they are just big enough to build a defense tower or two on them. Imagine you had big plateaus for entire bases, maybe even with natural ramps leading on them. Right now, elevation on the planet nearly doesnt matter. That should be changed. So far for my ideas^^
Perhaps it would allow for more control over the generation if Water Level affected only the water level and not the biome type distribution - decoupling water level from biomes so to speak. And perhaps the Biome Scale slider should get broken down into a single slider for each biome type available on that planet type. Just food for thought.
I vote for many many more sliders. I also want sliders for mountains (the objects), fissures, rocks and trees. It would probably work best if you have a basic set of sliders (6-10) and an advanced set (everything you can think of).
I have always had a problem with the planet gen. It either generates water planets or mountain planets.
Yeah, a slider for the amount of mountains, plateaus, cracks, etc would be nice. I want to be able to make very plain planets as well as planets containing lots of land barriers! yes, YES!
This. Actually we have this in Biomes concept pictures. Adding this ability to planet generation would bring more strategy. We had it in TA, Supcom/FA : why not in PA
Having played around with the planet editor a fair bit, it is fairly clear that those ugly grey mountainous regions are tied in with the water height. The lower you go with the water height the more your planet will look like this: At the moment, it seems if you want a planet with little or no water you have to compromise by having a lot of these ugly grey mountains. The mountains are always snow capped no matter what temperature you set your planet to, so if you have a desert world, the unavoidable presence of these mountains spoils the "theme" of the planet. If you would like a desert world (or ice world) with little or no water AND you would not like ugly grey mountains, you are out of luck. I assume of course, as with everything, that the planet editor is a work in progress and these things will be addressed. Maybe by un-linking the generation of mountains to water height and instead including some more sliders for specific features like canyons, plateaus and lets not forget the slider for ugly-grey-mountains !
It's easy enough to create a copy of the desert biome that isn't tied to the distance from water, or a planet definition that includes desert but no mountains. Objects such as cracks ("brushes") are tied to the biomes, so a separate slider wouldn't be easy to do (not impossible, but not currently moddable, the devs would need to change the way the Boone loading works so mods can hook in and change them just before planet generation).
I never have this ugly mountain issue but I join so many games where its there. Also dont have to crank the water to zero to get no water. I find the planet size ties into the variance of the height range and water. A slightly larger planet, with water height at 20 will get you some tiny lakes but no real water bodies. The height i leave as is most of the time, sometimes a touch lower. Avoiding using the extremes of any settings will reduce ugliness in most cases.
