Are there plans to have procedural map gimmicks per planet? What I mean by this is each planet having particular features or play styles created for it. Like a large valley running across the planet or a ring of water, enclosed mountain ranges around starting areas, things like a mote for the starting area only one entrance, etc. In general features designed for pushing the fighting on a planet in a certain direction, built into the procedural planet creation. The most obvious type of this is water dominated worlds supporting strong naval armies. I'd love to hear about some plans for this kind of stuff.
I feel this kind of stuff is what we'll start to see once the whole process is more optimized and near "completion". There is still tones of Biomes and planet types missing(most of them really) and we only have a small sample of terrain doodads at the moment. Mike
Do you think they'll introduce all biomes first, then work on the planet generation? I would have thought it easier to work on things like generated features this early rather then waiting until the different biomes are implemented. A valley on a metal planet and a valley on a rock planet aren't really different. I could be wrong and it could be easier the other way around.
It is more likely to be the other way around, makes more sense to me to refine the generation process THEN add in the additional biomes and you'll just have to do tweaking for each one. Mike
The planet generation is going to continue to evolve. In fact Allen has a check-in on deck that cleans up some of the current capabilities and makes a few things better. The metal biome work has started so we'll be doing some of the set piece type things with the metal planet. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out. So yes I expect the planet generation to evolve and keep getting better. I feel like we are barely scratching the surface.
Having looked a bit at the biome generation blueprints, I can say it is both very cool and very easy to extend/add new ones. I can forsee some pretty epic mods.
