Dear Gaslamp devs, if you're reading this, please consider giving us an option to allow flexible item spawning in the wizardlands. It's sort of soul-crushing when all you get are vanilla items when exploring them. I know they're all built from a random seed generator, but it would be nice to have mod support for things you can find there. You can already see modded features (like custom blockers) to some extent, but more flexibility is always a good thing. I'll pay you anything you want if you ever figure it out for us, somehow. Thank you for listening to me QQing about this.
How would it work? leaving off the fact that they're not exactly identical for everybody (they should be), how would it work with adding and removing mods? You would have to create entirely new wizardlands/graffitis that only work for one person (since the ability to share them would make games explode for those not having the mods) which means you'd almost need to make them all non-shareable?
Make a "random item" spawn which would spawn an item of a given level, randomly chosen from both the core game and all activated mods, and just add such a spawn to the generation code. Or something. Yeah, changing an already established code can be a lot of work. But it's not like it's impossible (merely time-consuming and possibly difficult), because it's possible to make a "random" spawn.
Potentially, mod makers that wanted their mods in wizard lands could add their own syllables for wizard land graffiti, and only codes using those syllables could produce the mod's items or rooms. As for sharing, the mod providers could give lists of which syllables were theirs and let people sort it out for themselves, you'd know if you didn't have the right mods, as you'd get a Diggle Hell portal instead of a wizard land.
Wouldn't adding custom wizardland rooms automatically change the layouts produced by existing wizardland codes (as it did when patch 1.1.2 came out)?
Yes, it would. It's one of the reasons why nobody wants to touch seed-based whatever generation just to add one or two more things.
When something is generated based on seeds, adding more things to the generation script tends to put everything that was in it prior to the addition out of whack. It's not as simple as merely adding one more possible result because there is only one random "variable" which defines what will be made, so increasing the degree of complicatedness tends to be time-consuming if one doesn't want to break anything within the code. In the most extreme of situations, even the checksum might change, meaning that the old codes and the new ones stop being compatible.
I still don't understand why changing the Wizardlands should be any different from changing any of the normal levels (which are also randomly generated)
It's because the codes create the wizardland based on a set number of rooms and such. Add to that set and suddenly it will change the layout of codes that have already been explored. For example say you had 5 fruits, a strawberry, a banana, an apple, an orange and a cherry and you were to choose two of those fruits based on the words that someone says. But each time they say the same words, you have to choose the same fruits. Now imagine someone adds another fruit, maybe a blueberry, suddenly instead of 5 to choose from the algorithm has 6 to choose from and now the words choosing the fruits suddenly don't exactly match anymore so a new match must be made. Someone can probably explain it better, but that is a start and I hope it will help clarify and not obscure.
This is a problem because it requires making sure that the whole thing is not breaking anything, which can be a lot of work at times, and later dealing with idiots who will keep on posting that "game suxx now coz coddes good not be working good now fix or die" and as someone who has experience with writing programs I can tell you that dealing with such idiocy isn't pleasant. Of course, we haven't as many such idiot here as some other forums, but the point remains. And for the difference between normal level generation and wizardland generation, normal levels do start with a seed that is one room but from then it is random, rolled at the time the level is generated (meaning that are no set commands), while wizardlands are generated from seeds in their entirety, so they have to do everything based on commands sent by the seed, and adding yet another level is like adding a command to a fighting game that requires you to push "maybe this button or maybe that button or maybe a few buttons at a time"; there's nothing saying it can't work, but there also isn't anything about it being easy. Also, I would like to note that we are currently conducting a discussion about whether or not it is possible based on an offhand question by Daynab, something some of you might've taken as GLG's official statement which it is not.
I've already given up on it as a bad job, it must be because I've played too much minecraft. I suggested an alternative elsewhere as a compromise, seeing as we're probably not going to get something like that until dbaumgart gets that total conversion out some day.
How was it handled when the new rooms were added? How is it going to be handled the next time an expansion comes out? Personally I don't understand how it is even possible that everything doesn't completely change automatically whenever anything is added or removed. It seems to me that the addition or removal of anything should act kind of like a frameshift mutation in DNA, or to give an example from Rogue-like videogames if I were to generate two worlds in Dwarf Fortress using the same world-gen parameters and random seed but removed the "[METAL_PREF]" tag from the goblins in one of them. Since everything does not change like this I can only assume that some kind of safeguard must have been deliberately built in to prevent it from doing so. If this is the case then depending on how these safeguards were designed it might be possible to add a flag that would allow them to be disabled in MOD.XML
Something just occurred to me. Will custom items and rooms spawn in Diggle Hell? That seems to be more random than regular wizardlands. If so then perhaps a solution to the problem posed by the OP would be to have an option to go to randomized wizardlands appropriate to a given level* *(perhaps with some mitigating factor though, like maybe the random wizardland option for any given level would only be available after finding a key on that level (similar to the one that got you into the pocket dimension in the first place; with the important difference that you wouldn't be guaranteed to get one in any given game); after which an appropriately numbered button would appear on the portal console, under the space where you would type in a normal wizardland code).
I think the only thing that changes the wizardlands are if any rooms are added or removed. When the patch came out, they added a number of rooms and now the wizardlands aren't the same between the two versions. So if a mod added rooms to the wizardlands, anyone without that mod would not have the same experience in the wizardland made from the same code.
Actually, this thread inspired me to do some experimentation, and I think that even adding rooms may not change the layout (at least not if modded in through the standard method rather than changing the actual game files (which I didn't test)). I haven't tested enough to say that conclusively yet though.
I made another suggestion concerning the availability of random mysterious portals from the wizard portal room based off of Bohandas' idea. Thanks for bringing that up; it might actually work somehow.
BRAINWAVE! Has anybody tested to see if things like the paranormal investigator's Skepticism ability and/or through debug commands!? BECAUSE If things generated on the spur of the moment can include custom items then it may be as simple as adding a room to the official wizardlands where pulling a lever makes an item appear or which contains a Chest Of Evil.
