Natural Diversity

[Bartender]

<a contenteditable="false" data-ipshover="" data-ipshover-target="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/5518-necora/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="5518" href="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/5518-necora/">@Necora</a> I have them in a separate file, which is identical in structure to the tree file.




The first thing is that I added the grasses template to the WeakComponentDescription part of StartCondition.rsc:

Code:

    WeakComponentDescription _naturalResources
    [
        "Template/NaturalResourceGrass.rsc",
        "Template/NaturalResourceRock.rsc",
        "Template/NaturalResourceOre.rsc",
        "Template/NaturalResourceTree.rsc",
    ]

Now this by itself gives an error if you try to load it. By pure accident, I had done something else simultaneously that somehow mitigates this error. It is weird though, and I don't want to know how broken the game code is for this to work. I had added a 'spawn' description to the rock template:

Code:

// layout of the entity
ComponentDescription resource
{
    // how often to update
    UpdatePriority _updatePriority = None;
    
    // declare types that will be used
    Description _descriptions
    [
        "map",
        "model",
        "naturalresource",
        "spawn",
    ]
}

SpawnDescription spawn
{
    Spawn _spawn
    [
        {
            ComponentDescription _naturalResource = "Template\NaturalResourceGrass.rsc";
            float _minSpawnAge = 1.1;
            float _maxSpawnAge = 100.0;
        }
    ]
}

Now as I mentioned above, this doesn't do anything by itself (so without the change in the StartCondition.rsc). It doesn't give an error, but it doesn't spawn anything either. For some reason though, the combination of the two does result in the new resource getting spawned naturally in the world.




One thing I have noticed though is that adjusting the spawning behaviour is a very tricky thing! After a lot of testing I have a rough idea of what each variable does, but they are all interdependent so understanding the fine details of their workings is very difficult. Another thing that makes it even more complicated is that changing the spawn behaviour of one resource, also influences the behaviour of the others. With some settings for the grass template I noticed an increase in rocks and ores for example.




EDIT: I had forgotten to mention that you also need to make sure that your mod loads new versions of the easy, medium and hard.rsc. You don't need to change anything in them except for an extra line somewhere to force the game to use the ones in the mod. These load the StartConditions.rsc, and if you don't do this they will still load the old one.