Originally posted by Lelo Mariin:
Originally posted by Crater Creator: You’re right that the biomes barely change. In fact, there’s only one biome map, which is used in one of four rotations. The devs know this isn’t great. It’s a band-aid while they work more on RWG.
Generating the maps takes longer than in A16 and earlier because it’s generating the entire map up front. This technique has advantages over the old method of generating chunks at runtime as you approach them.
Nitrogen is cool. 
Why is it that a 3rd party program like Nitrogen does a 100 times better job and incredibly faster than the "official" RWG the Pimps made?
'Better' is subjective. Nitrogen looks nice, yes; But maybe that kind of biome and world generation isnt someone's cup of tea- for them nitrogen is worse.
Nitrogen is not perfect. Neither is the official generation, to be sure.
Nitrogen though is in fact, it's rife with problems that TFP have gone out of their way to try and write out of the random generation over time, Like buildings spawning on giant circular pillars, or creating giant circular depressions in the land; Or hills covered in craggy mountainous features when they really are not tall enough to gain or warrant that effect.
Nitrogen also makes little allowance for the performance of the end user's PC- There's nothing stopping a dozen sky scrapers from spawning in a small area and making the area unplayable for those with worse PCs- For a third party utility, that's fine.. But for the game itself, the whole generated play map needs to remain 'playable' down to the minimum PC specs on the store page.
As for generation time, You'd be comparing a basically finished program that was explicitly designed from the ground up to create random worlds using a language that is incredibly useful for procedural layer-by-layer generation of something (Nitrogen) -- To a program designed for many other things of which one is random generation; And the random generation, while it has had a fair amount of work, is still unfinished. Yeah, There'll be differences in generation time. Even if TFP's RWG was 100% implemented and complete, Nitrogen would still beat it out in generation time because it doesn't have to split resources with the game side of things during generation; among other reasons.
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