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[Livonia] Player spawn patterns
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Description

Hello! We run some fairly popular PC Livonia servers, and have noticed some strange patterns in player spawn behavior. We would like some clarification on if player spawns are pure RNG or if they are "weighted" in some way.

First of all, these are the spawns we have configured. Mostly vanilla spawns, but we borrowed a few "Hop" spawns to try to spread people out a bit more:

As you can see, they are pretty evenly-distributed across the map from West to East.

As of 1.09, we implemented a log entry which logs the coordinates of a player when they spawn in with a new character. We then generated a heat map (modified version of Sumrak's Deathmap) to show the tendencies:

As you can see, spawns are weighted pretty heavily to Brena and Kolembrody. Grabin and Sitnik, despite having numerous spawns configured, are not getting much love. To clarify: the heatmap is coordinates of players at the moment they spawn in, not player movement after they spawn.

Is there anything I can do to make the player spawns purely random? I think the stock answer would be "add more spawns where you want players to spawn", but from what we're seeing, that may be futile(?).

Thanks for any pointers you can give!

Details

Severity
Minor
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Always
Operating System
Windows 10 x64
Category
General
Additional Information

We have attempted to increase the "max_dist_player" and "max_dist_infected" spawn parameters to very large distances compared to the defaults. This has been with moderate success, but far from the desired "randomness".

		<spawn_params>
			<min_dist_infected>200.0</min_dist_infected>
			<!-- <max_dist_infected>70.0</max_dist_infected> -->
			<max_dist_infected>12000.0</max_dist_infected>
			<min_dist_player>200.0</min_dist_player>
			<!-- <max_dist_player>70.0</max_dist_player> -->
			<max_dist_player>12000.0</max_dist_player>
			<min_dist_static>0.5</min_dist_static>
			<max_dist_static>2.0</max_dist_static>
		</spawn_params>

Event Timeline

sanguine00 updated the task description. (Show Details)
sanguine00 edited Additional Information. (Show Details)Sep 19 2020, 5:18 PM
moeb1us added a subscriber: moeb1us.Oct 4 2020, 7:56 PM

Hey sanguine, do you think it would be an option to test out to reduce the available spawn points near and in Brena, and then see via heatmap what exactly happens? Will it still be weighed higher, only with less variance the spawn positions, or will it be less pronounced?

I don't think it will matter, moeb1us. We've already increased spawns around Sitnik, Grabin, etc. with only marginal success. The ultimate goal is to be able to configure the spawn system so that it simply selects spawns using "pure RNG".