Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">As long as the white dots remain purely white there is no problem.

Re: Maps available
 

It is only the white dots that are important. Border colour is only used to ease up neighbor-guessing.

The white dots are scanned right-left bottom-top or something. Size of provinces and terrain must be given by you (in mapedit) or an external application. The game itself don't do this.

I'll try to find something on province stats.

Re: Maps available
 

OK here's a list of terrains. Add the numbers to get multiple terrains.

nothing 0
small 1
large 2
sea 4
fresh water 8
mountain 16
swamp 32
waste 64
forest 128
farm 256
nostart 512 - for islands and special provinces
manysites 1024 - increased site frequency

Example: Large forest - 2+128=130


* Edit: now the smaller Versions of ringworld and miirunst are available. *

[ January 10, 2004, 12:01: Message edited by: Kristoffer O ]

Re: Maps available
 

I was able to hack the DomMap code to do things like add the required headers to the map file. And remove the 8 dots of color in the upper left of the tga file which Dom1 required and Dom2 hates. And I vastly increased the size of the tga. I gave up n trying to find the routine that numbered the provinces in Dom1 order instead of Dom2 order. And I see he started on the terrain thing but he was using the terrain discussion that we had in the strategy newsGroups while Illwinter went with a different suggestion. (I think Im the one that mentioned it but now I have to go back and find all my old bit-math notes)

I would be VERY appreciative of a fast and dirty upgrade even if it made the old ugly maps.

Im thinking that a color smoothing routine might make those old maps look better. Like saving the borders and capital dots and running a "glass" function, then pasting the borders and capital dots back.

Then we can talk improvements. GIMP has 3 rather nice world generator scripts which can be batch processed. Ive created a new palette for GIMP that makes one of them work alittle better (less water). Im messing around trying to learn how to do layers since I think doing borders and capital dots on a layer would have great advantages.

Im still surprised that I havent located some really old world generator that creates worlds with the trees, mountains, swamps type of images I remember from old EGA days. Or even a decent set of icons for use in map making.

[ January 10, 2004, 15:32: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

I had a look at the code for the dommap generator. It isn't too hard to read, and changing the way it works would be fairly easy - in fact, I'm seriously thinking of adapting it so it at least works with dom2.

Still - it's mainly building a random elevation/richness map, and cutting it up into small provinces. I'm not sure I like the way it handles province capital placement, but it seems to work fine, so let's not mess too much with that...

But, the maps it produces don't have the nice feel that the original dom2 maps have: pixel color in dom1 is supposed to indicate terrain, while in dom2 it's totally irrelevant (except the white dots), so I'm not sure what to do about it. In fact, I believe the right thing to do would be to have Gimp do the final touches, but if Gimp can be batch-programmed, I don't know how, and I'm NOT rewriting dommap in scheme as a Gimp plugin from scratch (which, anyway, wouldn't be as portable as C).

I'll try to add my pet feature, which would be to make it able to produce the same map at various resolutions. It should be reasonably easy (as it is now, if you make two maps with different sizes, but the same width/height ratio and the same random seed, you get two different maps, but the coastlines (and, in fact, elevations) are essentially the same).

Re: Maps available
 

I hacked the original dommap program so that it creates files that can be used "as is" with dom2. It seems to work fine, within limits (not very pretty); at least the neighbours are correct, from what I've seen.

Now, with sizes in the 600 range and 90 land provinces (the dommap default), what I get seems very crowded: the flag symbols are way too large compared to the provinces. Is there a way to change that, or is the size of symbols always going to be the same compared to the map size? I tried fooling around with the #defaultzoom command in the .map file, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

If anybody's interested in getting this gem of a software http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif just email me; I already sent it to Gandalf, as he seemed very eager, and I'll try to get some web page created so I can leave it there, but in the meantime, I can email the zip file.

Re: Maps available
 

Well for those interested in things so far the zip is available at
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ommap-1.90.zip

There is also a run of maps in tga, jpg, map, and a zipped file with tga and map together
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...s2/RandomMaps/

This is a project in progress. And for those who dont know what DomMap is these maps will seem huge and ugly. They are coming out with pretty good neighbor assignments but no terrains (everything is plains, even the water). Feel free to grab any if you want to use it as a starting point for a manually created map

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I created a new Version (1.91) that tries to assign a terrain type to each province (based on number of pixels of each color - an ugly hack). It can be found at my lousy Web page. Feel free to copy and redistribute, or even to use the stupid thing.

Edit: the maps provided by Illwinter seem to be around 1600x1200, so that's the kind of size that seems to display correctly in the game. Unfortunately, the program's default size is much smaller. But if you use this size with the default amount of water and land provinces (10 and 90), you will see some small and some large provinces. Well, I did.

Edit again: the Version I posted yesterday had some stupid Last-minute bug where it crashed most of the time http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif Should be fixed now.

[ January 14, 2004, 06:53: Message edited by: PhilD ]

Re: Maps available
 

New map avalable in our map gallery.

This time it's an old favourite: Cirlani remade for Dominions II by Tiltowait.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Wow! It looks good! Even has the "cloth effect" =)

Re: Maps available
 

I have created and tested a new map, but I'd rather have a few more eyes take a look at it before I submit it to Illwinter for posting. It's 101 provinces, no wraparound, and a good mix of water and land.

Farthing Map (.ZIP file) - approx. 2.2 megs

Let me know if you catch any mistakes. I'd also like feedback on the look of the map before I do any more. I used a program called Campaign Cartographer 2, exported it to a big JPG file, dumped that into Photoshop, got rid of all the white pixels, made a few layers, drew in the borders, added the capitals, saved it as a TGA, etc.

It seems ok to me. I found a few problems during my tests but nothing major. I'm just hoping I didn't screw up anything like marking a mountain province as seas or linking provinces on opposite sides of the map.

If you have some time, please check it out and let me know how it is. It's the first "real" map that I've made for this (or any other game) and I would appreciate some honest feedback.

Oh, and I'm the person responsible for the bland United States map that was posted to the Illwinter site so blame me for mistakes on that as well (like the fact that the name is "48 provinces" instead of something useful). I created that as a test before starting on this map and wanted to make it available to people who might use it. I realize that it's nothing fancy but it does seem functional for smaller games, test games, etc.

Thanks a ton,
Ski

Re: Maps available
 

Very nice. Did Cartographer generate the map with all those trees and mountains? Or is it more like a paint program with terrain-type brushes?

The colors are alittle painful for me. I would pastel it abit. Lighter water and less bright grasslands. Make everything kindof meet closer to the middle. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Maps available
 

Cirlani looks great. Good province number and water provinces too!

Way to go Tilt http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

On Farthing I agree with Gandalf, the Grasslands are too vibrant in my mind, makes it hard to look at. Maybe put some shallow looking water near the coastlines if you like your 'deep water' effect.

Also your Borders are hard to see sometimes, make them more black?

[ January 14, 2004, 20:56: Message edited by: Zen ]

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's more of the latter than the former. CC2 doesn't really do any of the work for you, but it makes some of the drawing aspects easier. It has a range of built in "decorations" like the trees, mountains, and so on. It can make your coastlines more jagged, which is helpful too.

I definitely agree with the suggestion about colors. Most of those colors in the map are the defaults for CC2. The actual default ocean color they use is a bright cyan. I darkened up the water (sounds like I darkened it too much) but didn't darken up the grassy color enough.

I don't know if I'll go back and change the colors on this particular map, but I'll work on it for any future maps. I sincerely apologize for anyone that gets blinded by the Farthing map.

On another note, are there particular map styles that players are wanting people to make? Are there gaps in the available maps that need filled? For example, I think I'm going to try to make a small map suitable for just 2 people because I just don't know how many small maps are available right now. What other kind of maps do people want?

Re: Maps available
 

I prefer maps that have more land barriers than most of the existing ones do. The stratigic importance of provinces isn't really there a lot of the time. The economic importance dominates.

Things like bigger impassable mountain ranges (through several provinces) impassable forests, huge wastes... you can do it for any terrain type other than plains or farm land I suppose. Just some map (size doesn't matter [snigger] http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ) where the land terrain is broken up a bit would be interesting.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's more of the latter than the former. CC2 doesn't really do any of the work for you, but it makes some of the drawing aspects easier. It has a range of built in "decorations" like the trees, mountains, and so on. It can make your coastlines more jagged, which is helpful too.

I definitely agree with the suggestion about colors. Most of those colors in the map are the defaults for CC2. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Gave it a 35-second overhaul with GIMP.

Lighter ocean blue, less bright green, borders visibility improved ...

Get the .tga file here
reworked farthing .tga file

Haven't tested the file, though, so if anything goes wrong using it, just tell me and I'll fix it.

Hope you have fun ...
A.


edit: Had to invest some more 15 minutes to get the white pixels back (obviously something didn't work as it should). Used the opportunity to get the file size down to roughly 1/3 by reducing the colour palette to 256 colours...

[ January 14, 2004, 22:38: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Re: Maps available
 

Farthing: Looks great, though I agree with the others about the color, hurts my eyes. (dunno which paint program you use, but some let you have the command 'select similar', so you could select a white pixel/capital, select similar then copy em into a blank picture file, then change the colors and paste em back in, all without worrying about neighboors getting messed up)

I zipped through the province neighboors and did not see any problems. I wish I had that program !

Re: Maps available
 

Cant get the new one to load properly.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I created a new Version (1.91) that tries to assign a terrain type to each province (based on number of pixels of each color - an ugly hack). It can be found at my lousy Web page. Feel free to copy and redistribute, or even to use the stupid thing.

Edit: the maps provided by Illwinter seem to be around 1600x1200, so that's the kind of size that seems to display correctly in the game. Unfortunately, the program's default size is much smaller. But if you use this size with the default amount of water and land provinces (10 and 90), you will see some small and some large provinces. Well, I did.
[/quote]

OK for those following the DomMap project I have a web directory set up.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...s2/RandomMaps/

At the moment it runs 30 maps as large as I can get. Could be larger but I have too many things running on my server right now to mass generate the max size. Still they should be about 450 provinces (400 land and 50 sea) and a size of 1200x2400. The pixels are quite scattered which I should probably stop doing since it might be better for Dom2 to leave larger patches of color. The jigsaw shapes of the province borders is set to extreme so that there are lots of strategic locations on each map. Each map is in the directory as .tga, .map, a .zip containing both tga and map, plus a .jpg for easy viewing and for those who would rather snag the jpg. The terrains are fairly well guessed at and the maps should be playable so let me know if there are any problems.

There are multiple directions to move next. More directorys for small, medium, large. Web page thumnails for easier viewing. trying to script something to work the visual parts of them better. Scripting to offer daily maps with my touch of random insanity. Give me a clue.....

[ January 15, 2004, 20:21: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Thank you very much for the feedback.

Taking the comments that I got into consideration, I tried to make my second map today. Borders are darker and the water and grasslands are less abusive to the eye.

It's a very small map (19 provinces, no water) suitable for 2 player games. It's called "A Question of Symmetry" and anyone who wants it is welcome to take a look at it.

A Question of Symmetry - Small Map - 19 Provinces - Approx. 473k

Comments, concerns, suggestions or fixes are appreciated. I'm completely new to this so I apologize in advance for any troubles.

Ski

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Sorry, folks, didn't have the time to test it properly.

Looks like DOM doesn't like indexed palette colors .. .
Fixed that, but file size has grown back to 9 MB again.

Loaded the map/graphic up in the editor and it looked quite o.k. .

You can get the reworked .tga file here.

[ January 15, 2004, 20:56: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Re: Maps available
 

OK if you want to see what Arralens routine does to the DomMap generated maps then here is an example...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/way2hard.tga
(and YES its huge but its still in work)

Also if you are interested in the types of maps that can be auto-generated by GIMP then check this one out...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/rendered.tga

I can do improvements on that but Im not interested in drawing borders and placing capital dots. And Im WAY not interested in figuring out #neighbor and #terrain for the .map file. If someone creates a program for those then maybe.
(GIMP is a free way-powerful programmable Paint program for most platforms which is what the devs use)

Re: Maps available
 

And the new addition for the day is....
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion.../000index1.jpg

I cant seem to get the html part to work right. Maybe tomorrow. But at least you can look at the thumbnail index it makes and see the file names
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: Maps available
 

FINALLY! We are back up to where we were on DomMap for Dominions 1.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...humbnails.html

Now if I can get something to automatically do a slight blurring of the maps they will look much better (now that the old Dom1 pixel patterns arent needed). These maps are all playable. The .map file for each one has decent #neighbor and #terrain assinments.

Now for some improvments.

1) multiple download offeres? zip, tga, jpg, map

2) blurring (smoothing the image) of the maps

3) offering games of random crazyness

4) offering the same thing as today but in more sizes

5) offering the same as today but other DomMap preferences (such as less dots and larger blocks of color)

6) drop the DomMap and shift attention to the GIMP rendered maps because they are prettier

7) drop the whole thing and concentrate on getting a web-based server to work

8) give up period

COME ON PEOPLE. Im fishing for a direction here. Is anyone listening? Do I need to make a poll out of it to get some responses? http://www.sdmud.org/~gandalf/smile/saiyan.gif

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The maps are great, thanks! What I would like to see is map making tools for the computer challenged such as myself. I would love to make maps but am completely lost when trying to follow the map making/editing discussions. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif If it were possible to develop something similar to the map making capabilities in Kohan, I believe that we would see a lot more maps for the game. Whatever you do, don't give up. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Leadman

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Better yet, do both! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Oh, and many thanks for your commitment, you'll never get all the praise you deserve.

Re: Maps available
 

30 new maps are available, if you dont like any of them then check back tomorrow. They are all 450 land and 50 water.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...humbnails.html

They are playable as they are but are better for using as a base to work with the idea of making an interesting game map. Grab one you like, edit the image, edit the .map file, give it your own game name, and an interesting description. Add things, delete things, rename things, choose the opponents, boost them harder if you wish, or make things easier. The MapEdit.pdf in the doc directory of your game tells you the things you can do. Have fun.

[ January 24, 2004, 16:01: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

Gandalf: I tried looking at
<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">But the pages come up blank.?? I would love to see GIMP compared to the other maps. Looking at the maps from your Last post, I would have to vote:
6) drop the DomMap and shift attention to the GIMP rendered maps because they are prettier

The layouts are great, but as you said, you need some type of gaussian blur for the pixelation. I would like to give back to the community, which is my normal modus operandi when I'm hooked on a game, and it usually involves something with graphics... Actually I looked at this thread because I was thinking of posting a new thread asking if there was any real interest in new maps. I would like to see something a bit better-looking than the crosshatch-paper-texture maps done with pastel colors that come with Dom2. Is it worth the time investment? You seem to be having difficulty getting a positive response from the community:

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Is anyone out there using these or interested in new maps?

-Targa

Re: Maps available
 

Gandalf Parker,

I fully appreciate the work you're doing, and I constantly come here to check for any updates that involve your map project. In fact, I basically come here only to see what progress youve made.

Love your random map craziness, my buddy and I play them religiously (adds to the atmosphere going up against an army of pretender gods right at the beginning with only you're dinky start army, and if you're lucky a powerful random mercenary start group).

Keep up the work. I hope to see many new maps. I prefer smaller maps to the ones you currently have, btw - Ill never finish a 450 province map, ever, ever.

The_Maxx

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">But the pages come up blank.??
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">They are tga so you need a viewer that can see them. Try right-clicking the link and saving it to your machine then viewing it.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I could probably get something going which would generate piles of rendered maps from GIMP. But they wouldnt be playable. They would be good starts at an image that someone could MAKE a game map out of.

Part of the advantage of DomMap is that it also creates the .map file. Unless someone wants to write a seperate .map generator I would have to say the GIMP project is a ways off. On the other hand, a blur of the DomMap images does great.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Great. Me too. My community service usually involves something like moderating forums. That and hosting a site. Im doing alot more in programming, graphics, and web for this game than I usually do but thankfully so far no one has flamed me for it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">We have had a couple done that were satellite photographs. But they come up slowly. I think people would like to see alot of variety. Please do some.

For my part I will be working more toward simple, faster download, randomly generated, mass produced stuff which should help make yours look real good.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I like to remind them occassionally to thank the people here who do things. The concept of how to "pay for free things" so the people who make them feel like making more. Its not for me so much since I can see from my server logs how much traffic my stuff gets.

My maps get quite abit of download but its the worked ones that really get the traffic. The ones that do fun random things to the instructions in the .map file. Im working my way back toward the amount of automatically generated daily offers I had with Dom1.

Re: Maps available
 

I shoulda known that IE couldn't display .tga's. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

I see the difference now, and I actually like the DomMap pictures better. Is there any way you could adapt the program so you could "feed" it a picture file, and it would insert province borders and the white dots in the middle of each, along with generating a .map file? Perhaps specifying that shades of blue would be water and anything else would be land? (don't know a thing about coding). I whipped up a quick map in Bryce...if I had a web site I'd post it. But it's just a picture. The thought of hand-drawing all the province borders and white dots, along with making a .map file...ugh. Not to mention the unpassable borders by mountain ranges...hmm, that could be a problem for an auto-program.

Re: Maps available
 

It can be done but not by me Im afraid. I can work out alot of the steps (what programmers call psuedo-code) but turning it into a program is probably out of my league.

Re: Maps available
 

New thing going on here. Im not so good at understanding all of setings for DomMap so Ive come up with a hacker fix. Im running maps on almost completely random settings and saving the scripts that generate something I like. Many of them fail with errors saying xxxx cant be larger then yyyy and stuff like that. But Im getting some interesting results.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ndomMaps/junk/
Even though the results are playable I didnt expect to get more than junk (hence the directory name) so only the jpgs were put there but Im considering changing that. Is anyone else running the Dom2 Version of DomMap? Should I put these scripts there for viewing?

If you see one you really like and are quick with an email I can zip it and put it there for pickup.

On an added note... I am considering dropping the nightly runs of the Dom1 Version DomMaps.

Gandalf Parker
-- to email me replace Parker with @community.net

[ January 27, 2004, 16:11: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

How about making maps/pictures, but without any colors other than water? If you had the .map file and a .tga file with borders/capitals, it could be used as an overlay layer on a user-made map. I was going to try this with the ones you have, but the "speckled" colors make it too difficult.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm not sure I understand? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Do you mean that I should make a two colour map without capitals and borders? I could easily do a hundred of these, but would they be of any interest.

Or do you mean that I should make maps without borders and capitals?

Or do you mean that I should make borders and capitals without maps?

Or do you mean something in between?

Re: Maps available
 

Ok, hopefully this link will work...it's a free image hosting site I found:

test map from Bryce

Kristoffer: Actually I was referring to Gandalf's maps. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif The "speckle effect" would hamper modifications. I also can't select/delete the areas inside the borders, because the borders themselves are too ill-defined and pixelated. I realize now that I was wrong in what I was asking for though. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif What would be good (either from Gandalf/DomMap or from Kristoffer) would be a map with the following:

1) Water areas are solid blue.
2) Land areas are solid beige (same color as Aran map).
3) Province borders are drawn in.
4) Capital white dots are drawn in.
5) .map file exists, with water/land province info in it (but not strictly necessary as long as the Dom 2 in-game editor works with designating land/water provinces).

Then a user could take this "base map" and paint in green areas for fertile lands, add trees and mountains, etc. Also, it would be nice if you (Illwinter) would give us the icons you used in the game (the trees, mountains, etc).

So it would look something like this:

goof **EDIT: Pic removed and changed due to off-site hosting restrictions in storage space.

Except it would have province borders and capital white dots.

The first picture is something I threw together in Bryce real quick. That's sort of what I had in mind when I said I'd like to see a better-looking map. But the prospect of having to draw all the province borders, dots, and creating a .map file....ugh. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

[ January 27, 2004, 19:27: Message edited by: Targa ]

Re: Maps available
 

I love the Bryce map.

I can probably get DomMap to do larger colored areas but Im not sure if it would work that well. DomMap does 2 things now that save alot of time. Setting all the #neighbor commands and setting all the #terrain commands. Doing what you want would make the terrains have to be done manually.

With GIMP it is easy to grab the capitals and borders to a seperate image. Hmmmm brain kicking in here. Grab borders and capitals. Keep the original there but semi-transparent. Replace the pixels with smoother gradient effects but appropriate to what was there such as one for grass, one for swamp, one for mountain. Paste some of the icon stuff as appropriate. Then delete the original layer, merge the repainted one with the borders and capitals, save image. Hmmmm that could work. It would make all the original map info still good.

Another direction Im looking at is that DomMap seems to do a fractal landcape but pixels it in 8 colors possibly because of the old Dom1 limits. Maybe I can find the place in the code where it puts 1 color for a whole range of hieghts and change it to use a range of colors there for smoother effects. It would be better if some C programmer looked at it. The original DomMap programmer doesnt seem to be active anymore (Im half tempted to buy a copy of Dom2 and send it to him to get him hooked again MUHAHahahaha)

Re: Maps available
 

Wow I forgot all about Bryce. Time to dust off the cd and the skills heh.

Re: Maps available
 

OK, (duh!) I located and downloaded DomMap. Now all that's needed are the tree/mountain/etc graphics from Illwinter. Using the DomMap generated picture and map file, it's a simple matter of cut/paste in Photoshop to get this:

low-quality jpeg map

If the trees and mountains and stuff were available, it'd be fairly simple to make a Dom2-like map, although you'd still need to make the terrain match up... hmm..

[ January 27, 2004, 19:32: Message edited by: Targa ]

Re: Maps available
 

All you have to do then is just add a 3d for Banner, castle, temple and labs, and suddenly you have a 'pretty' interface. I'd enjoy it.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">No access. Daily limit something.

You can find a mapstuff file (xcf format) on the Illwinter site. If you need another format let me know.

[ January 27, 2004, 19:56: Message edited by: Kristoffer O ]

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Are you using the DomMap2 Version? Hopefully Phillip has the updated Version listed since we did alot of little tweaks to make the .map file match what Dom2 wants. Are you using it in linux? If you manage to compile it for windows let us know.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Are you using the DomMap2 Version? Hopefully Phillip has the updated Version listed since we did alot of little tweaks to make the .map file match what Dom2 wants. Are you using it in linux? If you manage to compile it for windows let us know. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I haven't made any new changes, but I updated the Version on my page to match the Last I sent to you.

I'm not going to try and make this produce much prettier maps; that would best be done with Gimp scripts, not a few hundred lines of C.

Oh, and it's Philippe, not Phillip. But you're not the first to make that mistake (even though I believe, even in English, it's usually spelled Philip).

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Wow! Nice! What kind of program are you using to make this?

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I can probably add an option to dommap so that it outputs only these colors (blue for sea provinces, beige for land provinces, white capitals, red borders, another blue for sea borders; I just noticed, though, that the border algorithm apparently loses some pixels, at least in the seas).

I'd leave the neighbours, and can either leave the terrain information or not, in the .map file. Or even add an option for each. AFAIK dom2 doesn't even try to guess at neighbours, so these are required unless you want to mess with them in the editor.

Any interest in this? It's most likely a 20-line hack - should be within my capabilities. After all, I'm just a CS teacher...

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Might be able to do this anyway. There is a setting for how pixilated and another for how much to try and follow the colors for drawing borders. Between those two settings it might already be possible.

What Id like to know is if dommap assigns those colors to a range of height. It does a full fractal map. If a height of 10-20 is given the one green pixel because of the old Dom1 restrictions, then maybe we can change it to do a range of green for each one between 10-20. Even figure in the height into the color choice.(instead of 10/200/10 it could be 10/180+height/10)

Re: Maps available
 

Kristoffer (and all), try this link:
low quality jpeg map

They apparently have a daily bandwidth usage for free accounts, so I found a backdoor. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

As for the mapstuff files, xcf is GIMP format, which neither I nor many gamers use. So if you could convert them to something like tga or bmp for us that would be great!

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I don't see a Version mentioned. I downloaded it from dominionsx I think, and ran it under WinXP. Worked fine...at least for creating the picture file. The map file is there, and full of text, but I have no idea if Dom2 will actually read it correctly. It has a bunch of "neighbor" and "setland" stuff in it... I run it and it pops up in a DOS box, then produces random.tga and random.map files.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Bryce 4.0 from Metacreations. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Is there any documentation on using the Map Editor included with Dominions 2? I read the 2 pdf files that came with the patch, and they're not very explicit. They also don't explain anything about how to use the built-in program. I read on this board that if you use "guess neighbors" it crashes the game. My question is: Can the built-in editor be used to generate an accurate .map file? It appears as though it's just asking for a finished .tga file, but when I loaded one (complete with white dots for capitols), none of the buttons/boxes did anything. There was just a white indie flag in the bottom-left corner of the map the whole time.

EDIT: Found another freebie site. Try these links if you can't see the pics:
low quality jpg quickie map
Bryce test map

[ January 28, 2004, 04:25: Message edited by: Targa ]

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Note that Gimp is free, so you can use it. But I'd understand if you didn't want to switch from your favorite program.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I don't see a Version mentioned. I downloaded it from dominionsx I think, and ran it under WinXP. Worked fine...at least for creating the picture file. The map file is there, and full of text, but I have no idea if Dom2 will actually read it correctly. It has a bunch of "neighbor" and "setland" stuff in it... I run it and it pops up in a DOS box, then produces random.tga and random.map files.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's most likely the original dommap program, which is for dom1 maps. Look at the first line of the .map file: the new Version outputs something like "#dom2title random". It will produce .map files that can be used right out of the box to play ugly games, but then you can do almost whatever you like to the .tga file to make it bearable.

The new Version is available here .

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Might be able to do this anyway. There is a setting for how pixilated and another for how much to try and follow the colors for drawing borders. Between those two settings it might already be possible.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Might be doable, but it will likely result in Provinces with very convoluted shapes. You could set the various height/richness limits at outrageous levels so that it results in single-color provinces, but that will make it output the same terrain type for all Provinces.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's two fractal maps, actually: a height map, and a richness map. Then low/poor pixels are assigned such terrain type, low/normal pixels get this, and so on. There are command line switches to change the low, high, poor, and rich levels.

We could do more ranges, but because of the fractal nature of the thing, this will result in more isolated pixels. Plus, more work for me
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif . What is needed is smoothing of the maps, which is most likely what the Gimp scripts that generate maps do, so that the terrain limits are actually limits instead of lots of isolated pixels.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well GIMP would be another direction. So far we dont seem to have any scheme programmers showing up (which GIMP seems to prefer for scripts-fu). Too bad. A nice 3-step scipt would do much for fixing up the dommaps.

I can get some very nice rendered maps from GIMP. Maybe someone could write something that will pick up the images and dommap them. EDGE (put borders around large color areas. DIVIDE draw borders across areas still too large. CAPITALIZE put a white dot in the middle of each one. WRITE MAP with guessed neighbors and terrains. I know it would be a big project but it would be useable for any map coming from any program or even hand drawn.

[ January 28, 2004, 14:22: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

Ah...OK, I see it now in the map file. It says Version 0.7, so I guess it's the Dom1 prog. Well, I don't know anything about C, other than it being the 3rd letter of the alphabet so..... I found and downloaded "LCC-Win32" which seems like it's what's needed to run your Version (which I also downloaded, thanks!), but have no clue as to how to use it. Some searching comes up with some cryptic information like:

Open a DOS box in Windows, set PATH=c:\lcc-win32\bin, and that's about as far as I got. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

LCC-Win32 is "C only" (won't work with C++), so I dunno about that either. But in response to Gandalf's earlier question about getting it to compile in Windows, you guys should check out this page. It seems like it would work:
http://home.worldOnline.co.za/~rmaritz/

-Targa