[WIP] Devastated Metal Biome

Release Thread

Adds a lot of craters (and a number of unit cannons, because, hey, it was a war zone) Devastation varies with water height; if you convert a regular metal planet it has water height 0 and you won't see any craters.

Additional biome - this one isn't shipped with the game, and a server mod will be required to play it. Repo is client mod currently; change the type and identifier if you are copying it over.

- https://github.com/JustinLove/devastated_metal_biome

I changed bend trying to get things to work. I settled on using pinch most places, although the stretched craters do look odd. Ones near poles still use bend, I like having them all over more than I dislike the grid mismatch.

Had a look through the biome file, seems your settings are almost identical to mine (down to the 300 pole distance). I thought about adding an exception brush for the poles when I was testing, but opted against it. Do you have any screenshots with them, to see how they look?
Also, not sure about using weight_hard, have you ever encountered any intersecting craters? When I tested it, I didn't use weight_hard so that I could have the occasional intersecting crater (since I thought it looked cool).

Oh, is that what that does? This is my first time playing with the biome stuff. I tired adding a second layer to get the intersections, but I decided I liked the chokepoints that this generated.

poles: I only seem to be able to roll direct hits at the moment.

300 isn't really that big a range; you'll probably only ever roll direct hits on it, as anything further out will be a pinched brush.

I'm not 100% sure how the weight system works, but I think I've got a good idea. The layer is a weight map, with higher and lower weight based on simplex noise (at least in this case). Brushes are placed in areas of lower weight. When brushes are placed, their weight is applied to the weight map, so that you don't end up placing them on top of each-other. Hard weight means the entire area is weighted a certain amount by the brush, non-hard weight I assume affects it in a 'softer' way, so that brushes may intersect eachother, but will not likely be placed right in the same spot.

I'm just speculating here based on messing around a lot with my cliff mod, and based on the names of the variables. There's no real definitive info on this stuff yet.

I thought the noise_range controlled the chance, because widening it made more unit cannons appear. That was in the default setup, so the ring layer type may be different.

Whoops; I got mixed up a bit. Layer defines the noise map (from 0 to 1), noise range is the range from 0 to 1 in which your brush can spawn based on that. The weight map must be treated separately, though I'm still pretty sure it behaves as I described.

It might - if that's the case, using noise_range in combination with the weight values could have interesting stacking and conditional effects.

I can watch this fine from the replay browser with the biome mods disabled, but the replay link causes an infinite server failure loop, and clicking through relays with pastats enabled causes a client crash.

http://pastats.com/replay/12559003162107240432

The gameplay itself is quite boring.

I got this replay to load from the link with both client and server mods disabled. Does it load for other people?

http://pastats.com/replay/17964420276605070966

No need to watch it through - it's just AI, and I was distracted trying to test missile command (I failed; on the upside I discovered my game-over check is wrong)

Yeah, it works fine for me and I don't have this mod installed either. The icons for the planets seem broken, but that's about it.

Thanks; icon is expected because I haven't made one yet ;^) So whats left is that and seeing if totally new biomes work with people joining the game.

Do you guys think it will be possible to add damaged layer biome like this dynamically during gameplay for mods that want to bring in planetary lasers and non-instawin planet-planet options?

Eg. Planetary laser is fired - massive damaged bimoe is added at point of the hit and the navmesh is updated.

In principle, the metal crater could be used just as easily as the regular crater (well, it may be a little more complex, csg wise) One of the issues (which I've flagrantly ignored) is that it's designed to line up with the metal grid; it doesn't work near the caps, and even close craters start to get pinched near the poles. If I didn't switch to no-pinched (not aligned) near the caps, the crater would actually bug out and create some holes in the planet geometry.

These planets also seem to be fairly time-consuming on planet generation, so adding them dynamically might not be performant.

Perhaps some of the heavy lifting such as nav-mesh recalculation could be spread over 10-20 seconds after the impact to make it smoother to update for clients?

Perhaps we should wait for the halley craters to actually be craters ;^) Something like that may figure into it.

Tried hosting a lobby; two people actually joined, but both loaded a long time and then disappeared. Anybody interested in setting up a match some time with an external communications channel in case of issues?

Converted unit cannons from brushes into reclaimable features worth 10k metal. Unfortunately the controls for number of features aren't very good, and the system designer preview is wrong.

Actually managed to start a game. Maybe the CSG just takes longer than people want to wait?

Now I just need to make a planet icon.

Icon attempt 1: lighting is a bigger issue than I thought; it doesn't blend.