dynamic forests

[sabinati]

the current forests are somewhat boring, i.e. they never change without player interaction, all trees look the same (especially in conifer forest), etc. perhaps they could be made more interesting with a little help from tile decay.

when decay hits a forest tile, if the tile is more than X tiles away from any other tree but less than Y tiles away from any tree, a tree sprout would have some % chance of spawing there, possibly with quality average of the trees in a radius of x tiles and the soil q of the tile, or just q10 i guess. if there are no trees within Z tiles, the tile could have a % chance of changing to a different terrain type, either grass or mudflat or possibly swamp, with a greater % chance if that tile borders another tile of that type. there would probably need to be some kind of regional thing in effect so that all the tiles in the region would change to the same type.

perhaps these trees could be somehow differentiated from player planted trees, and grow more slowly, even on their native terrian. that would then allow for the trees to get to a death stage, where they would fall over, leaving a stump and a fallen log or logs. i don't think many players would like it if this happened to their trees though.

when decay hits a stump it could have a % chance of rotting the stump, causing it to no longer be useful for wood blocks, but perhaps allowing for the growth of a new edible fungus. maybe in this state another decay hit would have a chance to make it rot away.

another thing that might help is having the wild crops behave more like forageable herbs (as well as more foragable herbs, berries, etc). they would still only be found on the same respective terrains, of course, but i think having a giant field of wild onions or hops growing in the forest is pretty silly, while i find the idea of finding a few wild onions in a cluster from time to time much better. these could be effected by soil q as well, i suppose, or they could just all be q10 like they are in their current form.

hell, maybe a few different fern types in addition to the current one.

this isn't all completely thought out yet, but i think that having trees in different stages of growth, and some chance for the shifting of terrain types slowly over time would make the world a bit more interesting. maybe it's something that could be tried out on the test server at some point?

[kimya]

although we have had a lot of ideas regarding "living" nature and especially forest i think its good that you mention it again, sabinati! great idea with the rotting trees and growth of new ones. i really like it! wouldnt even be very difficult to implement, as far as i can see.
boy i'd love to have a changing environment! these ideas show once again how much more HnH might/will have in the future, this game is just perfect

[niltrias]

This is the best idea for automatically evolving terrain I have read so far.

[Onionfighter]

I like this.
It would also be nice if swamps and mudflats had more stuff to interact with.

[niltrias]

I like this.
It would also be nice if swamps and mudflats had more stuff to interact with.

Definitely. I would like to see more herbs in swamps, for one thing. Making mudflats more interesting seems harder.

[sabinati]

I like this.
It would also be nice if swamps and mudflats had more stuff to interact with.

agreed.

[loftar]

Many of the things you mention are stuff I've already planned for. I've been wanting to implement at least the following:
* Forest tiles decaying to grassland if the trees are removed.
* New trees sprouting in sparse areas of forest.
* Ploughed grass tiles having a small chance of decaying into moor instead of back into grass (and the same thing for moor into heath).
* Grass tiles next to moor or heath tiles decaying into that other terrain (and moor tiles next to heath tiles decaying into heath).
* Trees should probably have some slight chance of dying every now and then -- though I'm not sure how that should interact with bred high-Q trees.
* Other things. :)
The decay loop can easily consume a bit too much CPU for its own good if not optimized heavily, however; so I'm taking it easy on these things until I figure out a good enough implementation. I don't think it's very far off, though.

And yes, I've also been wanting to implement crops as some kind of foragable thing, though I'm not sure just what should actually be found in the wild. It could actually be fun with some kind of slight domestication process to make wild wheat into wheat and such things, but I'm not sure.

[loftar]

It would also be nice if swamps and mudflats had more stuff to interact with.

If there's anything that really needs more stuff to interact with, it would be caves. :)

But yes, definitely. Generally speaking, it would be fun and meaningful to implement more "base resources" for the various kinds of terrains -- it has just been hard for us to figure out just what. Heaths (and bogs) should yield peat, but it seems that has limited uses. The winds were actually an experiment in trying out a new kind of base resource, but I think we can all agree that they were a failure; at least in their current implementation and use.

[Jackard]

well they were always more of an obscure extra than something fully integrated with the rest of the game

[kaka]

all trees look the same

Growth and decay would definitely help with this, but I'd still like to see more variation between trees.
With the model I've discussed with J&L you draw a bunch of trunks and a bunch of branches for every
type of tree, then you patch them together with a randomness based on the trees position.

This is a sample program I made at the time.

You could even build the trunks with segments, if you wanted to.

This would also allow for a neat visual display of the number of branches, if they ever decide to make them finite.
I don't think Jorbs' too keen on redrawing the trees, though. ^^