Reforestation Clinics

[Onionfighter]

To gather clay from areas without destroying too much land, you can pave an area, then dig for clay in the paved over part. When it turns to dirt, just pave it over again.

[Malicus]

Yes, if it's not in a forest. If it is, then the moment something is done to the land, it's never going to be forest again.

[Pacho]

There needs to be a way to make new forest tiles. Maybe if there is a high enough concentration of trees those tiles should slowly begin turning into forest tiles?

[Raephire]

There needs to be a way to make new forest tiles. Maybe if there is a high enough concentration of trees those tiles should slowly begin turning into forest tiles?

agreed. And reduction of trees would turn it into grassland, - The minimap doesnt have to match this, but forest animals should spawn accordingly.

[kimya]

There needs to be a way to make new forest tiles. Maybe if there is a high enough concentration of trees those tiles should slowly begin turning into forest tiles?

agreed. And reduction of trees would turn it into grassland, - The minimap doesnt have to match this, but forest animals should spawn accordingly.

a "living" nature woult be great

[theTrav]

automatic tree reproduction as well as dynamically calculated forest & grassland areas would be awesome, and I think the dev's have considered it but are still nutting out the performance issues of having a bazillion trees.

One way of doing it would be for trees to add their own reproduction checks to a single schedule/queue which could be slowly worked through asynchronously by a thread with relatively low priority. Something like:

Code: Select all

// called when users plant trees or when trees reproduce themselves
void plantTree(TreeType treeType, Coords coords) {
  Tree tree = createTreeObjectInDatabase(treeType, coords)
  Date nextReproductionCheck = getRandomReproductionCheckDate()
  //treeQueue is a thread safe, sorted list, sorts on the first parameter
  treeQueue.put(nextReproductionCheck, tree)
}

// called by a thread with low priority whenever the 
void processTreeReproductionCheck(Tree tree)
{
  if (checkTreeAreaHasSpace(tree))
  {
    Coords newTreeSpot = getRandomTreeSpace(tree.getCoords())
    plantTree(tree.getType(), newTreeSpot)
  }
  Date nextReproductionCheck = getRandomReproductionCheckDate()
  //treeQueue is a thread safe, sorted list, sorts on the first parameter
  treeQueue.put(nextReproductionCheck, tree)
}

You could have the thread run behind, or skip trees, you could have a separate queue per grid square or number of grid squares, you could farm the work out to a separate CPU, all sorts of things.

[Pacho]

or maybe instead of checking every single tree, just check new trees on their moment of growth, and trees that are being chopped down (for the shrinking of forest tiles). That way it doesn't eat up as much CPU time since it doesn't have to go through the zillions of trees there would be later when there is a neverending map

[Peter]

An endless map would not actually be fully generated at any point; rather, it would generate areas as they are visited, and even potentially forget abandoned tiles. More likely, the number of active tiles could be related to the number of long-term players. For instance, if an average player visits 5 or 10 tiles regularly, and only occasionally visits 15 or so more, then 300 players (a rough estimate of the maximum theoretical number of players according to something I heard from jorb, I think) would have between them not much more than 7500 active squares at very most. At 500 trees per square (that's significantly higher density than currently), that would give us 3,750,000 trees. So, there's a number on it. As long as 4 million times the amount of memory per tree is less than 10 Gb or somthing, then a system might work, depending on the server equipment.

[Pacho]

I don't know if I'm seeing things, but I swear there are forest tiles appearing in this backyard forest I'm growing. Am I just hallucinating because I'm dreaming, or is it just that I'm so tired

[theTrav]

I don't know if I'm seeing things, but I swear there are forest tiles appearing in this backyard forest I'm growing. Am I just hallucinating because I'm dreaming, or is it just that I'm so tired

Read the announcement thread on tree planting. They've updated it.

Trees now create forest tiles when they grow. QUICK PLANT MORE TREES!!!