New Map Generator Options

With the release of MapGen 1.12.0 the options for the map generator have gotten overhauled.

It was often the experience that people would use the sliders to try and customize the map generation. However this would often not generate maps as expected for players.

To try and help this situation the options have been reworked so that players can create custom map styles by selecting the terrain, biome, resource, and prop generators. (Edit) This is what previous generators were doing under the hood based on the slider options.

The options are for now available in the 2024.6.2-alpha-1 client version. In the meantime the old sliders do not work with the new map generator.

Will this block regeneration of old seeds or will the (version) number of the old seed be able to handle it just fine?

Old seeds with the version will generate just fine

Did something change with the current live version? Because the maps I'm able to generate are absolutely trash and nothing like what I was generating even a week ago. I'm sitting here making maps with next to no mexes even when the bar is all the way turned up. Something is seriously broken with it right now.

The new map generator does not support the sliders anymore.

You can use the alpha client to use the new supported options. It should be released fully shortly.

Alpha client UI is severely lacking in options as well, I hope more are added before release. Why are the only resource options Basic, Low_Mex, and Water_Mex? Besides just lacking descriptions what they even are, only 3 options?

I appreciate the work to update it and improve it, truly, but breaking live mapgen before having a comparable UI update ready is just another -1% moment for FAF.

Unfortunately with the infrastructure we have is impossible to perfectly time every release.

Additionally more resource options may be added in the future but likely it will be released as is.

Those are the options that exist because that is all that has been coded to date. Under the hood previous mapgens were using those resources generators under the hood.

@sheikah

Is it necessary to replace the maps for the matchmaker with the new version?

Yes although I normally lag updating it by a little bit.

@snoog said in New Map Generator Options:

Alpha client UI is severely lacking in options as well, I hope more are added before release. Why are the only resource options Basic, Low_Mex, and Water_Mex? Besides just lacking descriptions what they even are, only 3 options?

Before there were only three options as well. You just couldn't select them directly. Instead you had the mex slider that acted as an input to these three options and drove the amount of mexes that got spawned. When I discussed the generator options rework with Sheikah I argued that we will at least need the mex slider in the future, but we couldn't reach an agreement. So we first implemented the parts that we could agree on. That is what you see now. If the community has a strong desire to have the mex slider back it could be implemented again.
What's definitely not coming back are the water, plateaus, mountain and ramps sliders. You are supposed to use a fitting terrain style instead.
The mex and reclaim slider are a different deal. I guess that the mex slider is desired the most. I'm not sure about the reclaim slider as reclaim is not directly visible on the map preview and there are various different reclaim (prop) styles to choose from, so it could be that they already give a broad enough range to choose from.
I'd like to hear some input from the community on this.

The mex slider is an insanely big deal and probably the most important slider since it completely changes how maps are supposed to be played.

Also since the other sliders were removed id really like to be some sort of archipelago style setting.

I would just add more resource generators before adding a mex slider.

Although I guess thinking about it some more it might be possible to add a slider for the prop and resource only since that might be more intuitive to use but probably needs investigation.

There is a big reason why all the og adaptive maps have tons of different mex (and reclaim) settings. It allows u to play the same map in a completely different style

Yes and that is easy to do in a predictable manner for a sinlge map with prescribed locations but it is not trivial to do in the generator. Especially since that was the biggest complaint, that the sliders didn't have the desired effects for players.

I appreciate the further explanations, I apologize if I came off salty, I kinda was. I would definitely recommend more mex/reclaim options in the future. As for getting a slider back, I guess the slider itself doesn't matter much if it's just mapped to the options we have now. But there should probably be an announcement explaining the changes and how the mex options are really still the same.

For clarification: the slider did not directly choose from the list of options. I'd guess 90% of maps used the basic resource generator. The value from the slider was used as a general density factor for this basic resource generator.

@sheikah said in New Map Generator Options:

Especially since that was the biggest complaint, that the sliders didn't have the desired effects for players.

Was that also the case with the reclaim and mex sliders or was that only about the terrain sliders?

@theweakie said in New Map Generator Options:

Also since the other sliders were removed id really like to be some sort of archipelago style setting.

Isn't the small islands style not more or less an archipelago?

Ah my bad, misunderstand. In that case, I'd say it's important to add a density option. And a description of what the different generators do would be nice as well.

@blackyps said in New Map Generator Options:

For clarification: the slider did not directly choose from the list of options. I'd guess 90% of maps used the basic resource generator. The value from the slider was used as a general density factor for this basic resource generator.

Technically it was used to select from those options and a density factor for all the resource generators but the type of resource generator selected was a bigger impact

Was that also the case with the reclaim and mex sliders or was that only about the terrain sliders?

Yes, I got those complaints for all the sliders

From experience i can say that the mex slider was way more accurate than the terrain sliders. I would set the mountain slider to max and half my maps wouldnt generate a single mountain.

@blackyps said in New Map Generator Options:

Isn't the small islands style not more or less an archipelago?

Not quite sure since i almost always used the sliders to create maps (will check it tonight) but generally speaking mapgen was quite bad at creating good water maps