clseibold

Just have to say, this perfectly demonstrates exactly what I was talking about. From my perspective, your condescending tone comes from viewing the world cynically. You are not offering the benefit of the doubt to other people, and now you've taken your interactions with one person as an exemplifier of the entire world. I have been trying to be nice here, but it is not lost on me that you felt the need to explain what the game was about to a person who bought the game, and then insulted my intelligence when you gave me the loaded question "it didn't occur to you to check up one level from the API?" after I already said "but I didn't look very far", a statement that suggests that I consciously chose not to look very far in the first place. If I consciously chose not to, that means the thought did occur to me. But how you went from me consciously not choosing to "look very far" to me not knowing how to look at Github repos is really the entire problem here. You went from someone choosing not to do something to someone not knowing how to do something. I really don't care anymore. I'm just providing my point of view. To reduce it to "everything is taken as a personal insult" to suggest the world is terrible and everyone else is the problem is cynical, and it tells me you don't care about other people's perspectives, only your own. And I think this is consistent in how you dismiss user feedback, too. Regardless, I don't want to spend my time arguing with you. Maybe the world isn't nearly as bad as you like to think it is, and maybe people are rightfully upset about things not because they are stupid or aren't extending the "benefit of the doubt", but because your actions do matter in the world and all humans have responsibilities. How you make someone feel, how you talk about them, how you interact with them, how you convey their actions or thoughts, do in fact matter. Think on that. I'm not choosing malice as the reason for your actions, I just think you view yourself high above other people, frankly.

No, you're presuming my knowledge level without regard to the hints of information I've already provided that suggest I already knew that making the land more traversable would be done with the freaking perlin noise parameters! Which is exactly why you're being condescending - it's not just your tone, but your belief in other people being stupid that is driving your tone. For example: It did occur to me. And I had checked. I didn't check very thoroughly before because I didn't care, and I shouldn't have to care. What I can see is a vsapi, some mod examples, the survival mod, a repo for a build of the vintage story server, and the issues repository. And that's just at first glance, but usually the main source code repo would be in the popular repositories section. See what I mean by condescending? You're trying to tell a person who already knows how perlin noise works how it works. You're trying to tell a person who bought the game what the game is about. You're trying to pull in other people to this conversation to do the very same thing. And now you're telling me how to look up stuff on github, as if I haven't used github for decades now, especially considering I already explicitly told you I'm a programmer. You clearly think everyone except yourself is stupid. Honestly, that's your own problem. I don't have to prove myself to you, of all people. Either they wanted to make the change, or they followed user feedback. Either way, it goes completely against your argument that the generation was completely planned and perfect, because taking user feedback usually means you find some value in it.

First of all, there are two ways to make the land more traversible in the perlin noise function: change the frequency (like I mentioned before), or change the amplitude. Both work. Now, onto the more important stuff. I don't remember giving the impression that I didn't know how the perlin function works. I'm well aware how it works. It was, in fact, my point - they changed the parameters of the perlin noise function(s) (you can overlap multiple perlin noise functions) to change the traversibility, and one of the ways to do this is to change the frequency, to spread out the land. Which brought me to my point that I was originally responding to, which is that just looking at the land is much harder with a spread out land, which is why visualization tools are useful. Please don't take my words out of context. You are assuming that every person who dislikes the generation wants it to be more natural. That's all I'll say on that. It's a big assumption. You're oversimplifying worldgen, and thus using that simplification as the basis for why you think everything is completely planned out and perfect. And yet the developers just modified worldgen to make it more traversible, which means they believe they didn't get it right the first time. Which is fine, because that's how actual development works, not the romantic version you're trying to paint. If the game is open source, then that's cool. I don't remember seeing its source code on github, but I didn't look very far. The mod api being open source is not the same thing, btw. Regardless, not sure why you're being so condescending and presumptive towards me. Especially when all I said was if people found world gen issues, they can report them to the devs and they can figure out what to do with them. For you to imply I don't know this is a apocalyptic survival game, or that I don't know perlin noise when I had just told you I used it to program a game (from scratch), it's a really disrespectful tone. And for no legitimate reason too, other than to get back at people you find dumb. Well I'm not dumb, I just have different opinions than you. P.S. You'd think that when I use words like "amplitude" and "frequency", you'd realize I know how perlin noise works, considering these are literally part of the perlin noise parameters you're talking about.

I don't dispute that. But developer vision doesn't always match users expectations, which is why issue trackers and user feedback is so important. The seed is absolutely useful for looking at worldgen. Firstly, things are semi-randomly generated, so seeds help you get a consistent generation that you can look at to see how something changes. Looking at a different seed every time you change world gen settings isn't nearly as helpful (because you'd be changing multiple things now - generally you want to change one thing and see how it compares). Secondly, it allows you to pick out specific coordinates that you can send to other people, and then they can just look at that specific coordinate at that specific seed to see exactly what you were seeing. That seems extremely important for user feedback and for tweaking generation in a team. As for looking around vs. using tools, well, just looking around (going by eye) becomes harder when your land is more spread out. If the devs did make the land more traversable, they could have done so by spreading the land out so things aren't as steep, rather than just changing amplitude. That way you aren't changing the variation in height, just the movement between heights. But all of this is just speculation, I guess. It's not like I can see the code, lol. There's also so many different ways you can use perlin noise. In my game, I generate land first and assign biomes later, but I guess one could assign biomes and then generate land based on them. I suppose Minecraft does the latter, and simulation games tend to do the former? I don't know which way VS does it.

Imo, this is why I feel like it would be good to write tools to analyze the *result* of a map gen, so that you can see what your perlin noise stuff is actually generating in the end. The goal should be to have a general idea of generation in mind, and then make your perlin noise and other generation methods match that, not the other way around. It's harder to tell how things are going to generate with just the perlin noise functions, but it's much easier to look at what those functions are generating in the end result, and tools that analyze the end result map help to make that much easier. I don't have that much experience with procedural generation, but I was working on a project recently that did quite a bit of it. The biggest thing, imo, was knowing and reminding myself of the ordering of overlapping generations. For example, knowing that I generate lakes before rainfall (yearly amount for the region's climate) is extremely important, especially when the rainfall is generated based on the lakes, lol. Or that I generate general land with mountains and plains, then plateaus, then lakes, then rivers. Then I'd know better which layer will need to be tweaked (e.g., tweaking lakes would actually change river placements). It becomes easier when you're very careful in how you layer things, putting things you want to tweak directly on the bottom layers (like the rivers) and things you'd rather be calculated from other things rather than tweaked directly (like climate) further up. This type of information, though, is not very accessible to users. Which means, imo, it's much better to just give a list of world gen features that you don't like, where they occur, and on what seed (and gen settings), and the devs can figure out whether some specific layer of generation needs to be tweaked or not, and how it needs to be tweaked.

I do wonder how one would collect data on procedural world generation. That seems like a hard thing to do. I guess the best thing I could think of is to just give a list of different patterns/attributes of generation that you dislike, and then provide a bunch of seeds and locations where they can be found. Then the devs can see the patterns directly, make changes, and test those seeds to see if the changes took effect and helped solve the problem. The other option might be for someone to create some mod that looks for different specific patterns (like floating islands for example) in the world, sees how common they are, and then generates a list of them, their locations, and from which seed they are from. Something like a floating islands detector would have to look for contiguous land that has air blocks beneath it, for example. Not sure off the top of my head how resource intensive this would be though. Another world analyzer tool could be something that maps out the slopes of the land. This one is probably pretty simple in theory, but I'm not sure how one would create the visual for it. Maybe something like a top-view height map that highlights particular slopes that are bad, or something. I guess the problem with the gravel is just the general shape and size? So maybe analyze for gravel areas and gather info on how big they are (height, width, radius, or something of that sort). As for shorelines and the dirt/grass line patterns, maybe something similar to the slopes, but on the x and y axis rather than the z axis (assuming z is the axis towards the sky). Idk, these are just ideas.

Afaik, the X11 vs. Wayland scaling issue is about how they both deal with system DPI/display scale differently. X11 acts like Windows in that it creates the window size using the display's physical pixels. Wayland acts like macOS, where the window size is in points (NOT physical pixels), and the rendering framebuffer is scaled (using the system DPI) to the physical pixel size. This means events in X11 (and Windows) are in physical pixel space, but the events in Wayland (and macOS) are in window coordinate space, not physical pixel space. In Wayland and macOS, you would basically use the pixel density (which is dependent on the system's DPI scaling setting) to convert from window coordinates to physical pixel coordinates. I describe a bit of this more on the Github Issue, although I'm sure there's a lot more to this issue than just what I've described: https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/6222#issuecomment-3170505576 Importantly, I believe this issue effects both Wayland and macOS. Although I did see they said they had a workaround for macOS, iirc. Lastly, Wayland has an X11 compatibility layer, called XWayland. So even if they choose to stick with X11, all Wayland users will still be able to run the game, afaik. P.S. I have no idea about the performance issues of Wayland, only the DPI scaling issues. I am a little surprised that X11 would give higher FPS than Wayland.

Make sure the router port forwards TCP and UDP, and that the port is also opened in your Operating System's firewall. The wiki should have instructions for both of these here: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Setting_up_a_Multiplayer_Server And here for Linux: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Dedicated_Server#Dedicated_server_on_Linux