Gandalf's Random Circus 2

[Gandalf Parker]

I forgot a variation but it was probably a good idea because I remember it generated alot of conversation amoung the 3rd party programmers (player/programmers).

The idea was to write up special provinces in seperate little piece-files. A Dragon Pass, Crystal Citadel full of angelic beings, a Demonic Hellmouth, a Garden full of plant things, a Titan Mountain full of individual named titans with items appropriate to their names, an Island of Avalon, the Bog of Eternal
Stench, Summoners Sanctuary, or the Isle of Dr. Moreau. Each piece-file can designate castle, temple, lab, defence points, home race, sites, commanders, troops and magic items.

Then we hit a snag. In my random games it was bad enough when water things ended up on land or land units ended up in water. But a fancy site ending up in the wrong place was very disappointing.

In a conversation with the map-generator folk we started talking about how to have the TGA generator record the information it knows to the MAP file. Even if it was just to list each province and short-code the info on a remark line.

I could google for the conversations. After alot of discussion we started coming up with some short-code like this....
#setland 5 -- terrain=FRM terr_pct=065 area=000837 land_nbr=03 sea_nbr=02

This marks the province as farmland, 65% of it being the farmland pixel color, the size is 000837 pixels, it has 3 land neighbors and 2 sea neighbors.

This would give us alot of info to work with especially for my project to assign randomly generated names. If it was a sea with no sea neighbors then we could name it as a lake, if it was land with no land neighbors then it would be an island. It would also help in logically assigning sites, natives, etc etc.

The files could be kept in seperate directorys by land type and a random routine could select some then look for an appropriate location to insert it in the MAP. It would be really easy to collect these from everyone. Anybody could start playing with map options by designing sigle provinces before tackling an entire themed map.

Gandalf Parker

[ October 13, 2003, 01:42: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]