This week: got the population code actually working, generating distinct encounter data complete with names (now I gotta come up with a whole bunch of names for every single monster type, aah), and also did a bunch of restructuring the way encounter data is generated and stored to make that work. A lot of what's left to do with the population stuff is just... write encounters that use it. So more encounter variants, and more structural variation so that I can tie different encounters together. That's going to be happening slowly in the background for a while yet, since the goal is to have enough variations between encounters that there aren't any duplicates, or even any near-duplicates, and there are a pretty hefty amount of encounters that have precisely zero variations.
But with the bulk of the population code itself done, I turned back to map generation, since that's the thing that needs to interpret the population lists. I tried out doing map generation with tunnellers, which seems to be working really well, and I've got debug chunks generating for the new factory sections. This new map generation works in two parts: first, putting together an assortment of 'sectors' and connecting them together, and then second having each sector generate its tiles. Right now I'm in part one, so the generated maps are all just blank voids with a lot of debug annotations attached. I still need to reimplement PC map movement on the new map code, so I should be doing that at some point too.
(The plan for the new map generator, btw, is for the factory to be split up into three distinct sections, each with their own encounter types and visual style, with the general 'swamp' area scattered around connecting them together. This is on its way to being complete, and a lot of the map generation at this point is just... trying a bunch of stuff and seeing how it works.)
Next week: more progress with map stuff, hopefully getting the population thing working (which would mean finally having respawning encounters), and ideally some scene writing, though I'm not sure if I'll get around to much of that. We'll see.