Ok so I thought I'd go back and have a look at making a mission on FATA, it's a map I've always wanted to make a mission on but I couldn't remember why I hadn't.

So as I normally do I place my test composition down. It's basically a player with zeus, the ALiVE required module, Virtual AI system module, the Civilian placement and presence modules with no filters, extreme placement, and 35 pop cap all with debug turned on.

I check the largest settlement on the map and it lights up all green and happy, but civilians are only spawning in a line?

Yup sure enough

I thought it was an issue with the map, but you up the pop cap to 100 and now it starts to look better

finally 250 pop limit gives a good spread of civilians

Now obviously that many civilians is stupid unless you enjoy single digit frame rates.
I thought maybe I could really lower the spawn radius as I approach the town the building closest would populate and then as I walk through the town that "bubble" of civilians would make it feel more populated.
But no, as soon as I get close enough to the town for anything to spawn they just spawn right down that line again.

So is there any way to add some more randomization to the spawning process?
I mean it would be great to see something more like this with a 35 pop limit

At least that way you wouldn't be wandering through large portions of the town without seeing a single civilian.

Couple more examples from the large town on GOS Dariyah

Maybe it's only because I can see "behind the curtain" so to speak, but this sort of thing really kills the immersion for me.

Thoughts?

Yeah, although not as often because vanilla maps don't tend to have towns with as many buildings as modded maps do.

But this is Pyrgos, it stopped spawning before it even hit the 35 unit cap I set

I tried also at La Trinite on Malden, but literally couldn't get civilians to spawn there, they would spawn in towns all around, but not in the La Trinite.

Also for some reason I noticed ALiVE's spawning the VR guy again.

It's not about the line, that's just how I described the FATA situation.

It's about entering a town and 90% of it is empty because the civ pop cap was hit spawning civs in one small part of the town. Eg in the above map pic from Dariyah you can see my camera is at the far end of town, if I walked into that town it would be empty until I got to the far end because that's where the civs start spawning in that cluster.

In the Pyrgos map image you can see the big green circle over the town, in my opinion the civs should be relatively spread out across that circle instead they're all clumped together. If I did the exact same test with say a 250 civ limit then there would be a much more even spread.

Also yeah VR guy, the civilian in the VR gimp suit.

Is it possible Alive uses order the objects exist within the index files? Eg: checks proximity, then spawns down the list till cap is reached? I've noticed very similar behavior on Anizay, where some areas civs spawn in a cluster quite distant from the player.

Have seen instances where I am at point A, they spawn at point B. Then later Ill be at point C and they spawn around point A (all within the module set spawn distance of course, but in a blob a fair ways away while many nearer potential spawn locations aren't used.

@JD_Wang I have seen the same thing and have since started using the vanilla civilian spawner along with the ALiVE CivPop module to get civilians spawning in towns. I had a very similar behavior to the one you mentioned on most of the towns on Tanoa. Particularly the Lijnhaven area. The small villages would spawn stuff but the large town would not spawn any no matter what settings I used for civilians in the module.

In the past I've always used Engima's civilians script, which is excellent by the way. But as Heroes says it won't tap into ALiVE at all. I've only every used it for conventional battles or one off type missions.

Honestly all I'm really hoping for is for the civilians to be spread out across the cluster like in the 5th image where I just manually placed them.

There doesn't really need to be many more, they just need to spawn all across a town/city rather than in the same small clump every time. In that FATA example, if you have the limit set to default, you will never spawn civilians anywhere in that town other than where is shows in the images. The outskirts of the town will remain empty.

Without having any idea how the spawning works it seems like there's an array of places in the cluster that a civilian can spawn in. At the moment it seems like it spawns a civ at position 1 of the array, then pos 2, pos 3 etc, instead of selecting a random position in that array.

@Friznit Have you tried moving through town in a vehicle rather than looking at it from Zeus perspective?

Yeah as I say in that FATA example I even tried lowering the spawn range just to see if it would create a "bubble" around me of spawning civilians but no matter what direction I approach that town from that group you see in the first 2 images is where they spawn.

As I say the only way I've been able to get civilians to spawn across the town properly is by jacking up the pop limit to crazy numbers.

Does the green debug circle indicate the cluster size? Perhaps in this case it would work better if the town was split into 4 smaller clusters? If that's even possible without editing the map itself?

Ill try and do some more controlled tests in Anizay,l. I could be wrong, but I believe some of the more extreme cases I saw they were spawning in more distant clusters than the one I was in. It was definitely a more distant objective but with the density of civ structures it may be the civ portion was much larger than the objectibe itself (and it was set to mapwide, unfiltered if that could also play a role).

Initial impression was it was spawning by a list, but seemed to be based on max spawn range alone (900m or whatever default is). Will also reindex the map, could well be something funky with the index.