new map generator

[DrPraetorious]

By altitude?

I think you should be able to set which terrain types will be in different altitude ranges, and which will be seeded (with what frequency.)

For example -
lowterrain: ter;
where ter would default to sea but could be anything. If it's set to "plains" then low altitude is simply ignored. Myself, I think I'd set it to "farmlands" in order to have a lot of contiguous civilization.

highterrain: ter;
where ter would default to mountain but could by anything. If it's set to "plains" then high altitude is simply ignored.

tchance: ter chance;
Defaults to 70/10/15/15/30/0/0 (according to debug output) but can be set to anything - including a value for water and mountains if you just want those scattered around willy-nilly.

[Gandalf Parker]

On my maps I consider any province with one entrance (surrounded by castles) to be a cave. It just makes sure that there are caves someplace on the map.

Or squeeze a tiny province in-between the mountainous edges of two meeting provinces and declare that a cave.

The other possibility is to create small provinces at the side of the map in the border of it. Make those "caves". It gives you another level to the map. A neighbor arrow would run off to the side of the map connecting to one of the caves. It also allows for tunnel systems and underworlds.

[paradoxharbinger]

@ drP
this is one of the features that i want to put in, but, rather than looking simply at altitude, terrain types will be placed by proximity to water, which really just ends up going a step beyond looking at altitude. the thing i've been struggling with is how to implement it in a way that users can modify. i was playing with the idea of using cubic splines to describe the probabilities of terrains being placed with respect to water proximity, but i've been coming to realize, that it would probably net little gain, and would be quite difficult to implement and also would slow things down quite alot, not to mention that it would be fairly complicated for the user who had no idea what the hell i was talking about with splines.

anyway, i like your idea with the three groups of terrain, close-, mid-, and far-proximity could work out pretty well and i think would be a good compromise to the exactness that splines offer. the only extension would be to define how close each of the thresholds are.

so, here are some thoughts on how this might work out:

farm close:high chance, mid:medium chance, far:low chance
waste close:low chance, mid:medium chance, far:high chance
forest close: medium chance, mid:high chance, far:medium low chance
plain close, mid, far:high chance
swamp close:high chance, mid:medium chance, far:very low chance

@gandalf

im not sure what you mean by surrounded by castles, but i see your meaning with the one entrance (neighbor?). this might work once i get impassable borders going with small mountain ranges (not large enough to contain a province) and rivers.

i think that i would like to keep caves in the map, ie not putting them off to the side, maybe cave provinces could be borderless, and just have an icon on the map representing the entrance and possibly closer cavern provinces could be considered neighbours. this could mean that caverns are not dependent on a special case of mountainous terrain, which would present it's own special difficulties in determining where they occurred and forcing them to occur so that there are caves. this might be worked so that based on how close the cave entrance is to normal province borders will determine which provinces may be entered from the cave. so that if a cave entrance sits right on a junction of three borders, an army within the cave may enter any of the three provinces. on the other hand if it is to far within the borders of some province, an army in the cave may only enter that one province. going this route could present problems with caves that do not have exits to above ground, though. perhaps, it might be necessary to have an entire second layer to the map for the underdark.

[paradoxharbinger]

completely forgot what i was originally going to post. new map command to turn province borders on/off completely. saw a discussion of this over in ballbarians thread and stuck it in since it wasnt going to be a painful process to implement.

[DrPraetorious]

The immediate problem is that if you set the water-content very low it never comes out convex.

If you could seed the water - instead of using altitude at all - you could set the water frequency low and have a few lakes.

For maps with more water the altitude works fine, but for maps with no water it'd be nice to have a similar effect with farmlands going into mountains, or forests going into wasteland, stuff like that.

[paradoxharbinger]

the problem there is that you will never be able to get realistic looking coastlines. i am working on the lake issue though.

[Gandalf Parker]

Im sorry. I meant surrounded by mountains. If I have a small province on one of my generated maps that has only one way in and surrounded by mountains then I make it a cave. On my larger maps that tends to give me 3-5 cave provinces.

[paradoxharbinger]

sprites are nearly finished, there are just a few tweaks that i have to make to finish it up, so look for version 0.52 in the next day or two. right now i'm testing with some sprites that ballbarian posted, which are looking pretty good right now.

[paradoxharbinger]

mostly image functionality updates this time. sprites are in, borders may be turned on/off. also commands to name the files and run a batch of maps.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: i am not distributing any sprites with mapgen at this time. i was testing with some borrowed from another game, but i do not have a set that i can distribute. unfortunately, i am a terribly sprite artist or i'd have made a set of my own. but hopefully kristoffer will allow for the dom3 sprites to be distributed with mapgen in the future. until then, though, you will have to find your sprites on your own. that being said, if you're an enterprising sprite maker that would like to have your sprites distributed with mapgen, with full credit going to you, of course, let me know.

[DrPraetorious]

Thanks for the excellent work, PB. I'm going to start a bunch of MP games in early april using these maps.

This is low priority but would be cool.

If we could have high-site-frequency provinces that the mapgen new about, it could have sprites set to distribute (one per province I think would be ideal) in those provinces.