A Change to the Spawning

[Pony_Huetchen]

Maybe it's my "translator" mind, but I like playing in bilingual towns and all that "learning" stuff...
But, well, I've always spawned in towns where I understand the other language. So it helps...

I never understood the other language, but I love to learn a new language together with my character or have the opportunity to do some very gesture-rich emotes.

It would be a shame to prevent a bilingual town, that developed by itself. (If you don't like it, you can walk away)
Plus this dominated-language-spawns-system could give bigger language groups a advantage over smaller language groups, when it comes to ruling resource-rich places.

[Chris]

Reviving this thread instead of starting a new one....

Spawning definitely needs to be redone to take into account the shrinking population in such a large game world. Unfortunately, I get the impression that our current programming staff cannot do anything technically sophisticated. So my suggestion is simple. Increase the minimum population required for spawning. Instead of 2, make it 5 (or maybe even higher).

[Ronja Rotschopf]

What's the advantage of your suggestion, Chris? Taking the shrinking population into account I would say it increases the chances to spawn a character in a town where you already have a character. That's something I would consider as disadvantage.

Not to mention the problem for some very small language groups to get more than one spawning location after such a change

[Comy]

I think there's a check in place to prevent you spawning a character in a town where one of yours is already present.

I think Chris's idea is a good one for the larger language groups and could cut down on travelers creating a newspawn when they're just passing through a location.

[SekoETC]

Unfortunately, I get the impression that our current programming staff cannot do anything technically sophisticated.

Haha, thanks for the vote of trust. But generally simple solutions are preferred if possible. I seem to remember that the code for picking a spawning location is pretty silly. It takes a hundred tries at maximum to find a location far enough from your existing characters and if it fails to find one, it will default to one of the original spawning locations that may be near your existing characters or in regions that are no longer inhabited by members of your language group. It would be good if it got a list of locations with members of your own language group, excluding locations where you currently have characters, preferably also the locations where your characters have left from or are traveling towards, the spawning locations of your living or recently dead characters, current locations of recently dead characters, and still I'm sure there would be several options left to choose from, at least for most people. It could be like in the Simpsons where Smithers was working for a person to stand in for him during his vacation, and all he could find was ugly and incompetent people so he had to settle for Homer. The number one criteria could be to exclude locations with your current characters, keep adding more limiting factors until the number of possible places became less than 1, in which case it would go back to the previous list of options and choose the location from there.

Another thing I've thought of earlier was allowing people to record their home location, so that a person wouldn't spawn a character in their home town while their other character was out of town, and also to boost spawning in towns that have lots of solid inhabitants = ones that have consciously decided to call it a home.

[Snickie]

I like what Seko suggests. Having two characters spawned and grounded in the same location is nervewracking, and really hard! I've messed up before, and have been contacted by PD for it. The thing is that the younger character spawned in the place that the older character had left just hours prior with every intention of coming back. And I did freak out on the IRC as well a on the forums (though that one was a little more vague).

The current system also explains why, up to that point, I had nine characters on eight islands. (Now, due to moving and spawning, I've twelve characters on seven islands.) It also explains why my latest newspawn spawned where he did. I don't really know what this paragraph has to do with this discussion.

Oh, and curious, one of my characters would be very upset should the limit be raised from 2 to 5.

[Wolfsong]

Why not add a level of manual control to spawning? Say, when creating a new character, you are given the option to choose language group, sex, name, and whether or not you want to spawn in a higher (5+) or lower (2+) population area.

[Chris]

Why not add a level of manual control to spawning? Say, when creating a new character, you are given the option to choose language group, sex, name, and whether or not you want to spawn in a higher (5+) or lower (2+) population area.

That has been suggested and would be fine. The problem is that things that used to work are broken and haven't been fixed (e.g., animal spawning, the javascript build menu), and thus my comment about the state of ProgD. (That's not meant to be a complaint or a criticism, just my understanding of the reality of Cantr's staff situation and making suggestions that could actually be implemented in the foreseeable future.) My suggestion would involve no new programming, only changing a constant number that already exists.

[Doug R.]

+1 to setting a home location.

[muidoido]

+2, specially for really small language groups...

[DylPickle]

+1 to setting a home location.

Ditto. I think that'd be pretty slick.

[Sunni Daez]

I spawned an English one, where there were 2 people.. . according to google, I am on a Lithuanian island... I am headed off to my 15th place, have seen no one else, and a total of 4 animals in one town... beginning to wonder if there is other life and cannot figure out why she even spawned to this land. I do not wish to learn other languages by playing this game.. I think there should be an option.. random or your own language.

[Doug R.]

The two characters where she spawned were probably English sleepers. Was there a boat there?

[EchoMan]

Spawning alone:
It's possible to spawn in an empty town as long as there were at least 2 characters of your selected language group (LG) present the previous day or later. They could have left with a road vehicle or gone out of sight with a faster ship by the time of spawning.

Spawning in 5+ locations:
The code already prioritize larger towns over smaller ones with a square factor. E.g. a town that has 2 characters of your selected LG has a relative weight of 2 * 2 = 4 for measuring the chance of you spawning there, while a town with 5 characters of your LG has a relative weight of 5 * 5 = 25.

State of ProgD:
The state of ProgD is in fact pretty bad, and it's all my fault. I burnt out at my RL job this spring and I haven't had the energy to catch up on Cantr during my vacation. But it's getting better now, and I hope there will be a few more active developers pretty soon (if my absence haven't scared all of them away already).

[lulkoek]

I had a character spawn, ran off to find an empty town and now he's building his own little nation and language, (got permission from PD).
The only pity is that... people that would spawn there (if ever) would be English and I can't ask other people to join in the experiment as it would be CRB,

Anyway, to get back on topic: I don't mind spawning in towns where there are more people of another language, but... would it be possible (in the future) to keep in mind the percentage of people that speak a language in a town?
Like in one town there could be 100 people (I know exaggerated, but it's for the sake of explaining) and 95 of them speak English and 5 Spanish. If someone wanted to spawn a Spanish character, they might very well pop up in that town and actually be on 'foreign territory'.
It's not that easy to start the sim/game in such a situation if you have no previous characters or don't know the other language at all.