New World Gen: Island Solution

[theTrav]

One of the best things with an indefinitely expandable map is that I can modify the map generator even after the reset to add new features to parts of the map that are generated later

That statement seems to imply to me that you aren't planning on letting the server 'forget' generated areas and re-generate them again later, or that if you do allow it, you're not too fussed on whether it generates the same area (probably a reasonable decision actually)

I'm curious as to your current plans on when the map generation takes place. Are you going to let player actions trigger it? Via simply hitting an edge, or by increasing civ in an area, or player count. Or are you going to leave it as a manual process that you can just trigger via the admin client whenever you feel like it?

I'm also interested in how far you think the current generation will scale given your current server resources if you've done the number crunching on it.

I don't really know exactly where to take the map generator in the future.

I like techniques that generate a height map, then apply water/mountain/grass/swamp features based on the height and local features. Eg, less grass in places far from water, swamps in local low regions with poor drainage.
You could probably have your generated do a second pass to look for patterns that are common in artifacts that you don't like and get a fairly good result out of that.
Probably not a trivial exercise though... I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of your current iteration

[loftar]

That statement seems to imply to me that you aren't planning on letting the server 'forget' generated areas and re-generate them again later,

That's quite correct. I never really did understand that suggestion to begin with anyways, since doing it that way would also forget any player alterations to the terrain.

I'm curious as to your current plans on when the map generation takes place. Are you going to let player actions trigger it? Via simply hitting an edge, or by increasing civ in an area

Currently, I plan on implement it so that map generation is triggered whenever a player walks close enough to some part of the map that doesn't yet exist. Hopefully, that will allow the map generator enough time to work so that the map is complete until the time the player actually gets to the real map edge.

I'm also interested in how far you think the current generation will scale given your current server resources if you've done the number crunching on it.

Probably more or less indefinitely. A generated piece of map the size of the current map in its entirety only takes somewhere between 25-50 MBs of disk space, so I don't see that being a problem at all. It takes only a little more than that when actually loaded into RAM, so the only thing limiting is the amount of players currently logged in and how dispersed they are. The server loads the maps in smaller pieces than are generated in one piece, so even if all logged-in players are in completely different parts of the map, it would, in the worst possible case (which would be very unusual), take 10 MBs of RAM of map per player, or more commonly 1-2 MBs of RAM of map per player. Even more commonly, of course, players tend to be closer to each other than that, which makes the problem far lesser, probably by at least one order of magnitude. Map size is the last thing I'm worrying about.

[theTrav]

Awesome to hear!

I don't think I'll ever run out of questions though, what about the map decay function? Will having more map tiles generated affect the frequency with which it hits any given tile? Will you just run more decay threads? Will it change all together?

I'm guessing you're not going to assume that the edge generator will have time to complete right, you'll still have an invisible wall in place somewhere until the generator is finished... right?