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[Leif_-]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Can you add land/water numbers to the thumbnail views?

Implemented and applied.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Leif_-:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Can you add land/water numbers to the thumbnail views?

Implemented and applied.

---

Heehee. And just had to go over the top didnt you? Well Ok I see how you generated the numbers there. Hmmmm abit much bit-math for me but I might steal the idea someday

Hmmm I wonder if the web-based game site might not incorporate some of the randomizer routines as game options. As far as I know the players must have the .tga but not the .map file.

Also not a bad thought for challenge play. Generate a map (or select one from our sets) and make the tga available for download but offer a game without letting the players have access to the .map file. I wonder how many "expert" players that might mess up.

[ May 11, 2004, 19:35: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Leif_-]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Heehee. And just had to go over the top didnt you? Well Ok I see how you generated the numbers there. Hmmmm abit much bit-math for me but I might steal the idea someday

*chuckles* Not really. I had to parse the .map file and do some bit-fickling on the terrain value to get an accurant count of the number of land and sea provinces in the map anyway, so there wasn't really any extra work in adding the rest of the data.

I've updated the DomScripts.zip, so you can always download it and steal the algorithm from the make_map_description subroutine in run_dom_map.pl

As for adding randomisation in as an option on the web-based game site, I believe that should be relatively straight forward (but don't look at me - I try to stay away from web stuff. It's evil. Evil, I tell you.)

[PvK]

Today's Random_7 is a very cool-looking map with two continents separated by a sea.

One thing that might be good would be to re-roll the maps and/or tweak the algorithm until you get a bit more spread of terrain types. There are many that have zero provinces with certain terrain types, but tons of another type.

E.g.:
194 provinces in total, of which 5 are sea and 189 are land.
0% farm, 54% forest, 74% mountain, 0% swamp, 0% waste, 0% river.
95% small, 2% large provinces. 6 nostart provinces.

PvK

[PvK]

Also there is a bug somewhere, hopefully just in the web statistics, where it says:

On average a province borders to 2.77 other provinces

It is always 2.something, but visually it is clear that the real average is much higher.

PvK

[Leif_-]

Originally posted by PvK:
Today's Random_7 is a very cool-looking map with two continents separated by a sea.

One thing that might be good would be to re-roll the maps and/or tweak the algorithm until you get a bit more spread of terrain types. There are many that have zero provinces with certain terrain types, but tons of another type.

Well, actually the paramaters to dommap is choosen randomly for every map, so sometimes the generated maps end up rather unplayable. I should probably tweak the range for the various parameters, but there's so many of them!

Ah, thanks for pointing out the problem with the number of neigbours - I forgot that every #neighbour line affects two provinces. Whoops. :-p

Anyway, you might want to try the current Random_8 for the After the Vampire Wars variant. Should be an appropriate map.

[ May 11, 2004, 20:13: Message edited by: Leif_- ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by PvK:
Today's Random_7 is a very cool-looking map with two continents separated by a sea.

One thing that might be good would be to re-roll the maps and/or tweak the algorithm until you get a bit more spread of terrain types. There are many that have zero provinces with certain terrain types, but tons of another type.

PvK

Mine are limited more into a "reasonable" set of ranges http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion...andomMaps.html with one group being "chaos" running more in the style Leif does. But Leif's are run thru some gimp routines to pretty them up (the same could be done to mine but manually), and he runs some randomizers to generate alternate playing .map files for each one. Eventually we may move closer to each other in our outputs as we snag each others scripts

[PvK]

Ya maybe if the map terrain were interpreted before the beautification process were applied, it would come out with a wider spread of province types. Of course, being able to tell what province type it's supposed to be, as a player, could be tough.

So, another idea: a script that was going along and adding names to provinces, could also add the terrain types after the name, perhaps in shorthand. Just a thought.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by PvK:
Ya maybe if the map terrain were interpreted before the beautification process were applied, it would come out with a wider spread of province types. Of course, being able to tell what province type it's supposed to be, as a player, could be tough.

So, another idea: a script that was going along and adding names to provinces, could also add the terrain types after the name, perhaps in shorthand. Just a thought.

PvK

Not a bad idea. I have some partially done scripts for creating province names.
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion...PlainsName.txt
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion/maps/plains.bas
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion...orestNames.txt
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion/maps/forest.bas

Since the addition of the terrain codes I havent gone back to use them the way I had planned to name provinces. It would be easy to add a code to the end of each name.

And the "Theme Parks" project (Wauthan renamed it from Semi-Random Map project) does need a shorthand for terrains to be developed. It would overlap nicely.

[ May 12, 2004, 01:09: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Leif_-]

Originally posted by PvK:
Ya maybe if the map terrain were interpreted before the beautification process were applied, it would come out with a wider spread of province types. Of course, being able to tell what province type it's supposed to be, as a player, could be tough.

So, another idea: a script that was going along and adding names to provinces, could also add the terrain types after the name, perhaps in shorthand. Just a thought.

PvK

The terrain type is assigned by dommap before we run the image through the prettifier, so the problem is really in the range I choose the dommap parameters from.

Terrain-dependant names are a good idea, but you'd have to generate the entire name from scratch, so you'd need some kind of generator for random maps. Quite doable, of course, but I've got a couple of other items higher up on the to-do list.