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Topic: Geologist search behavior

einstein13
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Joined: 2013-07-29, 00:01
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Posted at: 2017-12-18, 22:53

For me changing default amount of water probability can be done, but not in a such radical way. 60 -> 30% should be enough. Maybe 20% is acceptable too. But 10% is way too little!

But if we change those numbers, I would like to see even deeper well, which will cost lots, but it will have 80-90% of efficiency.

Getting rid of water as a manual resource is a bad idea. Sometimes map creators change the default settings to prepare better map.

And about main topic: I don't like idea of changing geologists to "total random". I would rather see fix of current behaviour: if the flag is on mountain and non-mountain terrain, the geologist will look for ores in both places. I old Settlers 2 I remember that I was sending geologists into mountains and they were looking for water. That was annoying. In the Widelands I don't see the problem any more. But annoying thing is that if I have very small mountains, I can't send geologists there (the only place for flag is with resources).


einstein13
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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2017-12-18, 23:03

What about changing amount of water to "water yield" that would be basically probability that water will be mined on the field? And this water yield would be defined per terrain, or calculated from all adjacent triangles (depending on where water mining takes place exactly) ...

So map creator would have no control and no need to deal with water...

EDIT:

and geologist would just show field where expected water yield is > 50 % (or similar value)

Edited: 2017-12-18, 23:13

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teppo

Joined: 2012-01-30, 09:42
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 06:11

Tibor wrote:

What about changing amount of water to "water yield" that would be basically probability that water will be mined on the field? And this water yield would be defined per terrain, or calculated from all adjacent triangles (depending on where water mining takes place exactly) ...

Sounds like an option.

So map creator would have no control and no need to deal with water...

Why? The probability is only used after the well has exhausted.

This is not even too far from the real-life behavior.


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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 07:08

teppo wrote:

Tibor wrote:

So map creator would have no control and no need to deal with water...

Why? The probability is only used after the well has exhausted.

This is not even too far from the real-life behavior.

I mean there would be no water as a resource, so no exhaustion of it... This is what current 60% is


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 09:30

Tibor wrote:

teppo wrote:

Tibor wrote:

So map creator would have no control and no need to deal with water...

Why? The probability is only used after the well has exhausted.

This is not even too far from the real-life behavior.

I mean there would be no water as a resource, so no exhaustion of it... This is what current 60% is

A map designer should have the possibility to make an area of the map dry (no water) without the need to script that, imho.

The topics question seems to be answered for now: A geologist should search only mountains for ore, also the flag where he is send to is on non mountain area.

The thing with Water is quite complicated and i guess changing this will get a big change, what ever a solution looks like.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 10:30

Tibor wrote:

As I understand the probability thing - density of wells does not make any impact here....

currently it makes no difference: the wells will consume the little water that is within their working radius (at default water distribution (4) this is in my opinion 28 water (radius 1 means 7 spots times 4) ) at a rate of 100%. After that they are producing 65% which doesn't make it necessary to search for water. If we change the Probability if exhausted value to let's say 20 % we should increase the working radius to e.g. 3 which means you have 37 times 4 =148 Water at ratio of 100 % before falling back to 20% productivity. With the concept of deep well you can increase this to perhaps radius 5 which means another 60 times 4 = 240 water at 100%. In this case you just have to be aware to not place the wells to adjacent which is the same in reality. As long as there is the small default resource of water available this should work on the majority of the maps available with little effort to implement. By this mechanism the map designer really could make better maps and for the player it may be worth searching for a good spot for a well.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 10:39

kaputtnik wrote:

A map designer should have the possibility to make an area of the map dry (no water) without the need to script that, imho.

Yes I fully support this, cause scripting only works in scenario mode and the map should work in normal win condition mode in the way the designer had in mind.

The topics question seems to be answered for now: A geologist should search only mountains for ore, also the flag where he is send to is on non mountain area.

As far as I understood he should search all spots in his working radius if the spot is mountain he should search for ore if it is other he should search for water. This is a +1 from my side.

The thing with Water is quite complicated and i guess changing this will get a big change, what ever a solution looks like.

As I outlined in my previous post it shouldn't be that complicates as it can be implemented more realistic by just changing the init.lua of the wells. Perhaps I will try this if I have some spare time. Only thing is if to not override the settings of the map creator by default amount.
For me default should be used in the editor as a basis and then the changes of the designer should be taken instead. As far as I know the default water feature was implemented to support maps where there has been no water defined, which should not be the case then for widelands maps created by the editor. which leaves only S2 maps. And you could either restrict the feature to them or you just have to load them once in the editor to save them as WL maps with the default resource.

Edited: 2017-12-19, 10:45

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 10:57

The default amount of water already depends on the terrain type - see the editor help for terrains.

The topics question seems to be answered for now: A geologist should search only mountains for ore, also the flag where he is send to is on non mountain area.

+1 - if 1 of the 6 terrains adjacent to the flag is a mountain, search for mountain resources.


Busy indexing nil values

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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 11:41

GunChleoc wrote:

The default amount of water already depends on the terrain type - see the editor help for terrains.

Ah, i just found another bug which causes maybe some misunderstanding (at least for me): The resource markers the geologist set do either shows 'no Water' or 'Many Water'. There is no distinction between "low water" and "many Water" like there is for ore. So currently a player can't see the differences which relates to the default amount of water on terrains.

The topics question seems to be answered for now: A geologist should search only mountains for ore, also the flag where he is send to is on non mountain area.

+1 - if 1 of the 6 terrains adjacent to the flag is a mountain, search for mountain resources.

Yeah, +1

Edited: 2017-12-19, 11:42

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WorldSavior
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Joined: 2016-10-15, 04:10
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 16:41

So some of you would like to annoy everyone via changing the game a lot by making wells very bad.

But why at all? Currently, water in the ground can make wells 50% faster, isn't that nice enough?

Don't forget that wells will trigger annoying messages "no water found" if their productivity is below 33%. As the bug that messages of this kind cannot be stopped isn't fixed yet, this could lead to tons of message spam.

tosz once had some nice arguments, and I agree with him/her there:

tosz wrote:

Please, keep the water supply limitless!

First, an aesthetic argument (maybe other people feel the same about this). It feels so nice, when you know that most of the economy will keep on running even after stone and metals/minerals are depleted. You cannot expand any more etc., but at least the settlement is still alive.

And a more important argument. On most maps, where water is plenty, depleting water in one place would just end up in rebuilding a well somewhere else -- this wouldn't add anything interesting, since wells are small and don't have any special requirements to work. It would be just annoying to have to rebuild them every now and then.

.

kaputtnik wrote:

I think abolishing resource water is not good. It may get some importance in future versions?

Why should one change the game that much? face-wink.png

No0815 wrote:

I never understood the reasoning behind the way water is handled as a resource. But I also never got around to address this point either. Actually it would be interesting to know why water is handled the way it is @SirVer.

For now, this is what I would suggest:

Don't abolish water as a resource but completely change the way it is handled. Water can't be placed in the editor anymore, instead it is completely handled by the game. Think of it like trees or crops that can be harvested if present. Each node can hold one unit of water that can be "harvested" and is then slowly replenished over time. How long it takes depends on the terrain type. Seven nodes of meadow (since a well has a range of 1) should be able to comfortably support a well, even if two are close together (at least that sounds reasonable to me). On dryer soils, the efficiency would drop since water wouldn't be replenished quickly enough. I'm not sure if terrain like mountain and dessert should regenerate water very slowly or not at all and therefor hold no water to begin with.

What do you think?

It's very nice to see you here again, but I think it would be a change which is too big

Tinker wrote:

I agree with keeping water as a resource, there are some maps that already 'ration' water as a feature.

I like the idea of water having a terrain affinity, wet desserts seem so odd. It should be possible for a designer to tweak the levels in the editor but the standard setting should be set by the terrain, anything that forces players to find water is better than what we have now. Builing a well somewhere that there is no water indicated should give a low chance, similar to finding ore in a worked out mine.

Why? One is already forced to find iron ore, gold ore and mostly also coal. That's already a lot, so it's good that one doesn't have to search for water.

hessenfarmer wrote:

If we change the default probability we should change the working radius as well. In a way that it doesn't make sense to place the wells to adjacent to another. At least a rasius of probably ten would deliver sufficient water.

That's also a big change face-wink.png


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