Why Is The World Pre-Generated?

[Majorita]

So today I learned that Valheim's gameworld is not fully randomized, there's a pre-baked heightmap that is the world and when you generate a new world, you get a chunk of that to call your own.

My question is: why? I would love to hear from a developer.

[Majorita]

Originally posted by Gisbert:

Originally posted by Of Iron and Gold:

I regret reading this thread because I see it and now it cannot be unseen... Knowledge is pain! Guess I'll have to browse map mods now.

When I found out that you can accurately predict the weather for any day in any biome for any run, or that I can predict the weather even in your savegame if you tell me the day and biome you're in or I can calculate storm in the ocean to hunt sea serpants, that was disappointing enough.

Wait this game's weather is non-random? For serious?

EDIT: It took me two seconds to find because there's a github utility for seeing the weather and wind direction of every biome, every day.

https://jerekuusela.github.io/valheim-weather/

[Gisbert]

Originally posted by Majorita:

Originally posted by Gisbert:

When I found out that you can accurately predict the weather for any day in any biome for any run, or that I can predict the weather even in your savegame if you tell me the day and biome you're in or I can calculate storm in the ocean to hunt sea serpants, that was disappointing enough.

Wait this game's weather is non-random? For serious?

EDIT: It took me two seconds to find because there's a github utility for seeing the weather and wind direction of every biome, every day.

https://jerekuusela.github.io/valheim-weather/

Yes...
Sorry for opening this box too.

With the weather it is even worse, so weather is exactly the same with every new game and I already know on the 2nd day there is fog until 2 pm and on the 6th day there is a storm coming till night, etc...

Ironically, I would now even prefer the dart throw from the pre-baked heightmap for this system - to be fired randomly into the pre-rendered weather dartboard - at least that way you wouldn't instantly know what kind of weather tomorrow will bring when starting over.

If you have started over the 50th+ time, you know exactly what weather to expect in the first few weeks.


Another thing to think about is why they opt for a fixed weather model but then fail to make sense of the weather changes. With a fixed weather system, which they have opted for, it would be easy to introduce seasons or something similar. Appropriate transitions between biomes and so on.

It's like they rolled the dice once at release and then saved it for eternal repeat.

If fixed weather, then please with meaningful transitions and if random, then please completely random. Again - you get the worst of both worlds. We get rng which isn't rng.

I don't know why they went this way.

[muchdebate]

I have to say that playing day to day yes, there is a lot "non random" but I don't really notice it. I am never going to bother to check some kind of list to find out what kind of weather or what kind of terrain I "should have here"; that doesn't seem any fun to me.

[Majorita]

Originally posted by muchdebate:

I have to say that playing day to day yes, there is a lot "non random" but I don't really notice it. I am never going to bother to check some kind of list to find out what kind of weather or what kind of terrain I "should have here"; that doesn't seem any fun to me.

Yeah, and that's fair, it's cool. I bet there are many people who would never notice it! Or care. I do, though, it bugs me. The weather thing, I may never ever have noticed that, that woulda taken me AGES.

I figured out the landmass thing real fast though.

[muchdebate]

For me, I play with a group of four with a dedicated server, with my bestie in "his world" and in "my world #1" (I did make a second world for a second character but have not been back since).

The dedicated server world started with one huge fairly roundish continent, so I assumed that would be the case elsewhere. NOT.

My besties world's main continent has a huge but completely surrounded by land "inner sea".

My world has smaller continents, lots of jagged fjords and islands. Totally different feel.

I don't race through or try to "win the game" (what would be the point in a game that is about survival, exploration and building). All three worlds have very different feels; I would not bother to compare seeds or landmasses because again - what would be the point?

Yes, I know it's fake, and I also (having family members involved in hardware development) understand the limitations of so called "random" which never really is. Focusing on that would not be fun.

I focus on the things I enjoy.

[Shealladh]

I don't mind the weird random weather or some other elements. Adds a variety to gameplay, but like anything can always be improved upon.

Originally posted by Samoth:

Originally posted by Of Iron and Gold:

I regret reading this thread because I see it and now it cannot be unseen... Knowledge is pain! Guess I'll have to browse map mods now.

They fixed the underlying problem of it only using a sliver of the codex map. As it is now, all the maps rolled are quite different. Granted we all share the same POI, the density and scarcity are unique.
Since that time they updated the generator it has produced mildly unique maps from what I have seen. Nothing like it used to do before that patch. Where you were guaranteed to have the ring mountain island on the map somewhere. It's only difference would be what biome filled the central closed valley. Now you can almost expect to never see it.
Not only that, it is more often than not skewed in some way where the mtn ring is not complete. Too see it complete and intact now is a long, long shot. 1 in 100 if not 200 or more attempts to even pull then ring island and smaller chances that it is of any interest.

Not sure if there are Dev notes on how the landscape and forms are created, would be nice to see the games approach to creating each map.

From there, being able to mod in modifications for each step would be nice.

ie. land generation. Do I want a big island with big areas of each biome. Do I want less arpeggio styled smaller islands, or some other variant.

Having a choice of map creation style, say like Civilization where you choose, would go a long way to expanding on what is nice, but nicer maps.

Then being able to make the various POI elements as a percentage choice upon the map. So this could give us added ruins, various villages we as moders could add and a player can choose which to add. ie some people have a map with a hand made village, why could we not have a certain sized area of a map sa a blueprint. then say yes use this MOD addon village Once on mu new world.

Others could then also make huts, houses, animal pens, and have these as a percentage randomly dotted across a map in a similar vein but more frequent. This way we could have medieval villages added, slavic villages or what ever the community wishes to add via Steam Workshop or mods.

Other feature changes could also be possible. When I first seen a skeletington with a shield and sword, killed him, then disappointed I could not pickup that shield and sword.

Adding Troll fluffy "Dice" as a trophy to hand on my wall

[Shaken_Widow]

this is actually how the majority of terrain generators work.

it doesn't mean the game is using a prebuilt map and just cutting off sections.

the way terrain generation is done is by combining multiple versions of noise.

voronoi is the most used, there is also perlin, magic, multifractal for mountainous ranges, hybrid multifractal to combine two sets of noise to create varying types of terrains, hetero terrain, ect.

all of these are noise textures that are generated by code, while yes you could say that they're prebuilt heightmaps, that would be an utter simplification to the extent of misinformation.

the heightmaps are generated by noise generators, and are combined via biome selections.

they're not made from a "pre-baked heightmap"

the baking is done when the world is created with the seed, which is used to apply the noise accordingly across the terrain.

[Majorita]

If any of that is true then why is it I can overlay 3 different maps that have the same identical topography? Check the rest of the thread.

[Munin]

Originally posted by Majorita:

[...] My question is: Why? I would love to hear from a developer.

The map gen. system was made by Dvoid back in ancient times. Most likely, it just works the way it works because it worked that way, so to speak. I definitely can't nor can the CMs bother him with (for him) actually irrelevant subjects, therefore you'll not get an answer. Sorry.

Sometimes the things work just the way they work without somebody actually and deliberately having decided the way to go. Chances are high that the actual answer would just be "because it worked", like I already implied above. However, if you're interested in the "programming-why" and how random map gen. generally works, you might be better off asking this somewhere else. This forum is probably not the best suited place as most of the contributors here are end-users which speculate and guess (which is totally fine, but will not answer the initial question).

Talking about your initial question and underlying assumption: One of the CMs (with lots of insight knowledge) for example doesn't think the world is pre-made like many people, including you, think. To have a proper ground for discussion and to be able to ask questions, your initial assumption has to be correct, but for the time being, it remains an assumption which has not been confirmed.

[Majorita]

I appreciate the response from a moderator...

I just want to be clear that none of this is really meant to be openly hostile or interrogative or whatever, it's just something that I noticed.

If it isn't true that on some level the game pre-generates the topography of the game and then gives you a slice, why have we been able to locate several seeds that have almost the exact same layout throughout the entire map...?

I don't think my assumption was entirely wrong, I mean clearly the map in itself is not fully pre-generated, they salt it a bit with details like trees, rocks, randomized 'points of interest' but the landmasses of the game itself are clearly not strongly randomized.

I mean, I just generated three more seeds today, just for fun, nBiWZVj3TM 3YNg5SmqzW ZmlPWsYcsv that each are all still around the same area, same zone, not nearly as close-knit as the first few I did but still check it out:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/397533719960879106/1174308934312542219/Screenshot_from_2023-11-15_22-22-03.png

These are getting a bit difficult to see individually now so I colour coded these red, green, and blue.

I mean... just look at this, I sure can't explain it. What's going on with the worldgen? What is this? Why is it like this? Why do all six seeds share the same topography?

[magnificent moose]

The total landmass domain from where all Valheim maps are chosen from is so small its probably more likely that any given maps have at least some parts in common, as opposed to not having anything in common at all. This is the dirty secret of Valheim "procedural" map generator. Why is it designed like this? No idea. Only Dvoid could answer that, and to my knowledge he has not commented on it.

[LillianGibson]

Maybe because you can't play without a world?!?!?!

[magnificent moose]

Originally posted by Shaken_Widow:

it doesn't mean the game is using a prebuilt map and just cutting off sections.

I feel like you're answering a different question here. The game effectively does indeed use a prebuilt heightmap and literally cuts the landmass of every possible seed out of that. In this thread we're wondering why the game is built like that. The point is that we don't know, and until Dvoid tells us why he did it this way we also won't know. We can always try to guess however. Maybe Unity's Perlin noise generator is slow and Dvoid got bored waiting for it to finish during development and thus he cached one result and kept using that. And later forgot or deemed it doesn't matter and left it in or something.

[Samoth]

I still feel like there is plenty of variety to the maps. No matter how the map looks(in the reader) you never know what the conditions on the ground will be. Until you get there.
I personally have more trouble with them using the same models for everything everywhere all the time. No matter how low effort map gen might be, it is certainly worn to the core with 1-2 models of everything in the world. Two or so raspberry bush models, 1-2 Oak tree models, maybe just 1 rock model in BF, with the shoreline meadows rock model and I suppose the BF rock model. Making 3 in BF with two of them essentially recycled. And the extraneous Copper node. Is there only one of them?
And you don't see a different one until you make the swamp. All of the Plains maybe two different large rock models, not the stone pillars. Which has just a small handful of types. 1-2 Pine trees. On and on and on and on and on. That's where the lack of polish starts to wear through, imho. It is those kinds of details when passed over and added to the pile starts to begin to weigh on the title and bog it down.

[Shaken_Widow]

Originally posted by magnificent moose:

Originally posted by Shaken_Widow:

it doesn't mean the game is using a prebuilt map and just cutting off sections.

I feel like you're answering a different question here. The game effectively does indeed use a prebuilt heightmap and literally cuts the landmass of every possible seed out of that. In this thread we're wondering why the game is built like that. The point is that we don't know, and until Dvoid tells us why he did it this way we also won't know. We can always try to guess however. Maybe Unity's Perlin noise generator is slow and Dvoid got bored waiting for it to finish during development and thus he cached one result and kept using that. And later forgot or deemed it doesn't matter and left it in or something.

i think the reason you're confused to what i said is because you only focused on what you snipped from my comment.

i explained how terrain generation works.

yes, voronoi, perlin, and all the other noise types are able to be seen as just "prebuilt" heightmaps, but they're not just some set image size, they're generated via a script that uses math to determine the noise functions.

this is how voronoi, perlin, and all the other noise types i explained earlier were created, they were literally math, and you would run the code and it would generate a heightmap.

if you used the same settings every time, the noise that was generated would be the same every time, but you use manipulators such as "distortion, offset, x and y offsets, lacunarity, ect" to change the noise, and every single version of noise such as voronoi or perlin has the ability to be changed with an RNG seed system.

most terrain generators rely on these noise generations, and then apply the noise via the biome map system.

what i said in the quote you snipped was referring to the fact that while yes they are pregenerated noise heightmaps, it doesn't in any way mean the maps are generated from a prebaked heightmap.

the heightmap is baked when you enter the seed into the world generator, it uses that seed to apply the values according to each noise section of each biome, and to randomize the biomes themselves.

it's all pretty normal in development.

ps, im also pretty sure this is why the game is able to generate new terrain when the developers change the world generation system a bit in an update when you haven't explored the area yet.

each area is generated after you have explored the area, so that would mean it is in fact using the noise generation on the fly and then baking segments of the map accordingly, not using a prebaked heightmap.