Spawn Density

Problem

If you haven't noticed already, you could be strolling through the fields and end up with... 20 AI gaggled around a deer-stand.

The current implementation uses the TW_GridCoordArrayManager which pools TW_AISpawnPoint into grid coordinates. When the spawn manager receives player positions from TW_MonitorPositions it simply aggregates all the spawn points from those coordinates.

When spawning AI, the system selects a random spawn point from the aggregated pool. Which, is why in more unpopulated areas you tend to get a gaggle of AI.

Proposal

Refactor TW_GridCoordArrayManager to accept a filter class. When iterating over the grids, if a filter is set we can pass the coordinates through a filter to determine whether that coordinate gets included in the resultset.

class TW_GridFilterBase
{
    bool ShouldInclude(int x, int y);
}

When the grid-manager is initialized, or size changes, we can calculate a budget per grid.

Grid
    - number of spawns in grid (SpawnCount)
    - Max AI that can spawn in grid (AIBudget)

Configurable ratio to apply to grids (BudgetRatio).

For each grid, we need to normalize the maximum allowed spawns. 
Otherwise cities will have insane maximum budgets.

Budget Ratio: 0.2

Coord	# of Spawn Points	AI Budget
-1, 1	10	2
-1, 0	100	20
0, 0	1000	200

The budget ratio is not enough. It's great for unpopulated areas, but areas that are more dense will have wild numbers.

To combat this we can use a separate configurable value MaxAIPerGrid. Then we can take the minimum value between the calculated budget and MaxAIPerGrid.

If set to 10, we can reign things in.

Coord	# of Spawn Points	AI Budget	Actual Budget
-1, 1	10	2	2
-1, 0	100	20	10
0, 0	1000	200	10

When we spawn AI, we can associate the AI to the grid it spawned in. The AI will remain associated with the grid until it dies. Even if it moves into other grids. This should make for some interesting gameplay.

16 July 2025