Spawning improvements

[nihal111]

I'd like to better understand and improve the spawning algorithm.
Currently, I believe they spawn randomly and never despawn. This probably would mean after hours of exploration, there would be a lot more deer in the world than we'd want. We should probably look into having some spawn limit in place and having some despawning (based on range from player, or population in a region).

[nihal111]

Can we get some discussion going here @flo @Cervator @TheJYKoder

[skaldarnar]

I think entities are unloaded with chunks, and no deer will be spawned in unloaded chunks. However, limiting the number of deer that can be spawned in an area and/or having them disappear after time sounds reasonable. I won't despawn them based on distance to player though. Imagine you encountered a group of deer in some forest, go home to get the hunting equipment, and then go back and find all of them gone. Nihal Singh <notifications@github.com> schrieb am Mi. 22. März 2017 um 22:17:

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Can we get some discussion going here @flo <https://github.com/flo> @Cervator <https://github.com/Cervator> @TheJYKoder <https://github.com/TheJYKoder> — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABYbqgNyOwS5Omvl35fh72oYAxy_dR9aks5roY_VgaJpZM4Ml1SS> .

[flo]

The deers get only spawned when a chunk gets generated. So the amount of deers is limited.

I think it is not so unreasonable to let deers spawn only near the player if deers would despawn based on player distance as well. However it might be more fun if we let deer persistent as they are now and would give them a suspended state once they are farer away from the player for performance reasons.

[flo]

Oh and deers get (or should at least) unloaded with chunks so it's not infinite.

[niksoc]

This is an old issue, but it's still open so I guess I can add my 2 cents? How about making the number of animals in a region a function of the region characteristics? eg. for a herbivore like a deer the population can depend on the vegetation, water, shade etc, for a carnivore, it can depend on the number of herbivores. This way we can get a realistic ecosystem going (once there are more animals), and since it's a deterministic function of the map, we can spawn/despawn the animals when the player is not looking.