Any interest in a RMG?

[Gandalf Parker]

Another example. This is a Tower map.
Tower_1
I found some interest in this as a different type of game. Generating 1500 provinces only wide enough for the game to place one nation at a time stacked. Each player only had to concern themselves (mostly) with the nation on top or below them. There were also pipeline maps which were the same concept but running sideways instead of up and down. Maps like this would be great if they would wrap top-bottom for Tower and left-right for Pipeline.

Which reminds me. Does your generator mark off bad starting locations? Is that configurable as to the number of neighbors for consideration? Does it not mix land and sea neighbors in that count?

Feel free to turn me off anytime you want. This is one of my attributes (pro or con) that I store and generate lots of "and this too" ideas. By the way, seperate parameter files will be great. It will make it easy for me to script randomization within acceptable parameters between runs.

[HoneyBadger]

This thread makes me wonder if anyone's ever thought of a community effort map? We could take a 1500 province map-maybe Agrajag could make us a set to choose from? Gandalf could set the perimeters, and everyone could pick a portion of it to design provinces, do supplimentary artwork, write background for it, etc. I'd be willing to volunteer to coordinate the effort, as my time allows, as long as I was exempt from doing any heavy computer lifting-all I've got is my work computer and 3 busted up laptops.

[Gandalf Parker]

a couple of variations on that idea, yes.
But by all means, please feel free to try again. Start a thread.

[HoneyBadger]

I'll do just that.

[Agrajag]

Hmm, Pardox's RMG looks pretty sweet. Probably sweeter than what I could finish before being drafted into the military
And it doesn't look like there's anything specific for me to do that he didn't already. (Since he has wrap around maps, and you said he has icons)
So perhaps I should just work on my RMG for fun when I feel like it?

I'd really separate those things into a good, fast, efficient map generator and a .map interpreter / commenter. No need for yet another complex unhandy bloat program.

I agree. (Which is why if I had done that, I would have made it as another program)

It's a well-known rule that implementing something from scratch is probably to be better for yourself and the program than to take stuff from somebody else and then try to understand how it works and patch it in places to add functionality. But having a reference is good in any case. Comments are optional as long as function names and variables are sensibly chosen and there's clear indentation.

That's true to some extent, but not universal law.
For example, if you picked up my code, you could have "stolen" fractal.cpp and fractal.hpp and used them as-is on any program, since they provide a pretty much self-contained "package" for generating fractal heightmaps.

Maps like this would be great if they would wrap top-bottom for Tower and left-right for Pipeline.

If paradox's generator can generate wrap-around maps (which it can according to what you've shown me), then I'm guessing that it would be trivial to generate wrap-around towers and pipes.

Which reminds me. Does your generator mark off bad starting locations? Is that configurable as to the number of neighbors for consideration? Does it not mix land and sea neighbors in that count?

Of course, it does nothing yet, but it would be fairly easy to do such a thing, as it will be forced to generate a map of neighbours to generate a .map file, so just counting the number of same-terrain neighbours is easy.

By the way, seperate parameter files will be great. It will make it easy for me to script randomization within acceptable parameters between runs.

I think the best solution would be taking one command line parameter as the name of the config file (and default to something if there is no parameter given), don't you think?
Though thinking about it thoroughly, I have to give a "warning", to be as customizable as possible will also give pretty big config files. (for example, if you wanted to control the color of every possible combination of terrain tags you'd have to manually define colors for ~70 different combinations. [theoretically you'd have 8388607 combinations, but most of them don't really make sense together, or don't really deserver their own color. nor would they be possible.] )
Or are you talking about separate files for separate parts of the data? (like a file for colors, a file for thresholds, a file for heightmap settings etc.)

Re: Honeybadger
Your community map thread doesn't seem to jive well with my random maps, since you have people predefine what their provinces are like, and you aren't guaranteed to get a map that fits their desires. A more sensible approach for using a random map would be to select one map and then give sections of it to certain people.
(This applies to any random map, not just my own)

[Gandalf Parker]

Agrajag said:
Hmm, Pardox's RMG looks pretty sweet. Probably sweeter than what I could finish before being drafted into the military
And it doesn't look like there's anything specific for me to do that he didn't already. (Since he has wrap around maps, and you said he has icons)
So perhaps I should just work on my RMG for fun when I feel like it?

Oh please dont make me guilty of blowing you away. The other rmg appears to have stopped in development and you were on such a roll. But on the other hand I would be the last person to recommend that anyone not pursue the parts they feel are fun.

Or are you talking about separate files for separate parts of the data? (like a file for colors, a file for thresholds, a file for heightmap settings etc.)

Well it works for me anyway you want to do it. As for the colors.. Old Dom 1, and DomMap, both went with speckling the province with color. So one possible choice would be assigning a color to each basic terrain, and a setting for variation. Such as brown to mountain, and yellow to waste, then have the program speckle the two colors together for provinces which were mountain-waste. If the variation variable is set to 3 then the game could randomly use -3/+3 of the brown for each mountain pixel and -3/+3 of yellow for each waste. That would give a nicely blurred effect. Not so stark. And provide some effect provinces which are entirely mountain or entirely waste.

[Snoddasmannen]

lch said:

As I said, announced. Nothing visible yet. Let's wait.

Don't panic, I have been working on it. One of my modus operandi is getting stuck in tiny details which aren't very important. Right now I'm struggling with province borders around coastal areas. One of the things I'm sure somebody like lch would fix up in five minutes if I released the source

Tell you what, I'll try to focus on getting something which compiles, runs and generates a map. Then all of us who feel like it can work on the fun stuff together.

I'm away from home for the weekend visiting with my gf's family, but I will see if I can post a thread with a screenshot when I get back. I don't want to hijack another thread

[Agrajag]

Oh please dont make me guilty of blowing you away. The other rmg appears to have stopped in development and you were on such a roll. But on the other hand I would be the last person to recommend that anyone not pursue the parts they feel are fun.

So far I'm still having fun with it, and I'd dare say I'm not at all far from getting it to a usable beta state.
It can currently generate maps, place provinces and draw borders. It still needs some improvement on the last two until they are correct. After that there's actually generating the .map files (which shouldn't be hard, as I already store information of all neighbours and the terrain bitmask.).
After that, all that's left is making everything customizable rather than having almost all values hard-coded, and making the maps look graphically prettier.
Then I can release version 1.00 and start improving it based on suggestions

Oh, and if you feel like blowing new wind into my sails, then you are doing so with your inclination to host some maps generated with this RMG on your site.
This is because I'm about to add a few things which will be quite computationally expensive

Well it works for me anyway you want to do it. As for the colors.. Old Dom 1, and DomMap, both went with speckling the province with color. So one possible choice would be assigning a color to each basic terrain, and a setting for variation. Such as brown to mountain, and yellow to waste, then have the program speckle the two colors together for provinces which were mountain-waste. If the variation variable is set to 3 then the game could randomly use -3/+3 of the brown for each mountain pixel and -3/+3 of yellow for each waste. That would give a nicely blurred effect. Not so stark. And provide some effect provinces which are entirely mountain or entirely waste.

I saw it and I didn't really like it. I'm more inclined to have a single color per basic terrain and have the resulting color just be an average of all colors that apply (that's what it's like right now, except all values are hard-coded). The real variation should come by also assigning an image (or images) to each terrain type (like little mountains and trees) and have the program spread all applicable images on the terrain.
(Of course, there's always the option of providing more than one option )

I don't want to hijack another thread

I'm actually quite interested in what you have, since in a way you are a competitor

[lch]

Snoddasmannen said:
Right now I'm struggling with province borders around coastal areas. One of the things I'm sure somebody like lch would fix up in five minutes if I released the source

Oh, don't get your hopes up too high - I'm usually suffering from the "too many things at the same time" syndrome. But yes, somebody might help and improve the code for you. At least everybody would have the chance to do so, then.