can you speak C? fractal terrain? vga? tga?

[Ygorl]

Heh... I always wanted to conquer the Great Blue Plains...
It looks promising, though.

[Gandalf Parker]

Does look much better. Strange effect though. It still scatters dots for each terrain type then seems to smooth that color quite nicely. The overall effect might be excellent if we could shift the color of the original pixellations off of their EGA choices. Instead of tan-brown for plains, make it a light green. Instead of cyan for swamp make it a blue-green. Dark green for forest and shamrock green for farms? Then the pixeallation wouldnt be so obvious.

The dark-brown mountains are ok I guess. The tan-brown or yellowish could become waste. What you think?

[Gandalf Parker]

I dug up a blur.c once but never did figure out how to get it to skip the white pixels (and maybe the two colors of border also). Think it could be worked in?

Heehee. Just let me know when Ive gotten carried away. I can keep coming up with suggested add-ons forever.

[Leif_-]

At the moment, the colours used are hard-coded in colour_map[] in targa.c; someone should look into making them configurable.

[Gandalf Parker]

OK same subject, new thread.

Now that this works (quite nicely, thank you Leif), should this be a new program? The old one allowed for solid-color provinces which was even uglier than the defualt but was an advantage for some map-makers. I suspect that this one wont allow that very well.

Should we decalre this project to be DomMapVGA ??

[PhilD]

Gandalf Parker said:

WHile you were in there did you happen to notice anything that would make it run alittle "nicer"? The automatic generation scripts have to be carefully scheduled on my system to avoid trying to run when other cpu/memory hogs are running.

Neither the original author nor I tried to limit memory or CPU usage, so the map generation uses big nested loops and huge arrays to do the trick. Not exactly what you're looking for

[Gandalf Parker]

PhilD said:

Neither the original author nor I tried to limit memory or CPU usage, so the map generation uses big nested loops and huge arrays to do the trick. Not exactly what you're looking for

Yeah Im not really doing my part to help it any. When I generate 30 maps of a type I have a CRON job running a script, which chains to the various system scripts (tiny, small, medium, large, huge, epic, and chaos), each of those scripts call a basic program 30 times, the basic program randomizes the variables for dommap and shells to call dommap.
I really should try to clean that up.

[Gandalf Parker]

Im very happy with the change in this program. At the moment Im messing with the colors it uses but the effects are great. I had the "chaos" run use it...
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion...s/00_index.jpg
To see the jpg view or grab the tga/map for play go to
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion...s2/RandomMaps/
since I dont have it as nicely webbed as the other groupings.

I tried running it for the tiny/small/medium/large/huge/epic maps but I paintakingly came up with a level of pixellation that made those maps slightly less ugly. Now I have to rewrite the routines to drop that pixel efect way down to allow for this nice vga smoothing.

Interesting notes for anyone playing with the color codes....
Code:

---

static long color_map[] =

{

        0xC58F54,     /* WATER */

        0x4E7283,     /* WATER */

        0x5B4524,     /* MOUNTAIN */

        0xC8BE51,     /* FARMLAND */

        0x708841,     /* FOREST */

        0x34969F,     /* SWAMP */

        0xC4B0A4,     /* TUNDRA */

        0xAD9374,     /* WASTELAND */

        0xC3572C,     /* BORDER1 */

        0x2C87C3,     /* BORDER2 */

        0xFFFFFF     /* CAPITAL */

};

---

The first WATER is misnamed. Its actually PLAINS which is the default terrain.
The TUNDRA stumped me for abit since there isnt a tundra in the terrain settings. The .map file makes it a dual mountains/waste province. Thats kinda nice.

[Leif_-]

Gandalf Parker said:
Im very happy with the change in this program. At the moment Im messing with the colors it uses but the effects are great.

I think it's probably better to turn off the shading for the water (in addition to the borders and the capitals.) As it is, the maps tend to look a bit "messy."

[Leif_-]

I've updated the DomMap.zip with the ability to turn the new shading on and off and changing the various colours through command-line parameters.