3rd party Apps wishlist
 

OK I maybe should have followed my own advice and used the "search" link under the "New Topic" button before hitting New-Topic but I dont thin there is a thread already where this fits.

Anyway the DomMap project is going well. There is a working Version of the random map generator for Dom2 both for Linux and for Windows.
[insert URL here later]

The BLUR project for improving the DomMap generated maps might not be a problem depending on how some tests of upgrading the DomMap goes.

The GIMP script project for generating maps progressing but not as quickly as DomMap

The game-save app. has been worked on by various people. We have a batchfile/icon Version, a java Version, and a VB Version? Am I right? All for Windows but then the Linux people havent voiced a need.[need URL]

There is a desire for a god-save app

There is an app to make hosting PBEM games in windows easier[need URL]

There was talk of some work on a front-end app to set/save game settings then call dominions to create a game avoiding the long walk thru the menu to create a game when you always choose the same opponents and settings.

There is a working copy of a web-site front-end supporting tcpip games

there is desire for a CGI allowing the uploading of a 2h file which would facilitate making a web front-end for PBEM games

There is a the basic to EXE desires for some of the random game generators such as I do with Poke_in_the_Eye. I have not found a good (free) compiler for my code though some


There is a big desire for an app that can do half a DomMap job, read in a TGA that was manually created and write the #neighbor and #terrain guesses to a .map file.

There is also a desire for a an app that can read god files and print out the variables. Maybe even allow editing them.

there is a desire to ceate a sheet of sprite images from the game

There is a desire to read out the scoreboard information to a text file

there is a desire to read out the provinces owned-by to a file

Did I miss anything?

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Targa's Save God Utility is at Illwinter: http://ulm.illwinter.com/dom2/savegods.zip

Aikamun

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The java app that Torvak's done is posted on my site, available for immediate d/l. It's a .jar file, not an .exe, so it should run under linux, right?

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's handy, but its DOS/Windows only. Though modifying it into a linux shell script should be trivial ... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

I have started a personal project with php to make the hosting with my friends easier (uploading 2h, auto-hosting, emailing trn).Maybe when i've got it finished i would extend it to general purpose, like Space Empires IV PBW (creation and administration of games by Users).
I hope to have enough free time to do it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

I wish for a 3rd-party app that would rip the stats of all units to .dm format. That would make my life 100x easier.

Secondly, ripping the unit icons to .tga format.

It would take either a hacker (doing things that are technically illegal, though I doubt IW would mind) or a dev to accomplish these.

-Cherry

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is something Id love to see. Actually I looked into it abit but the upload apps were too involved. All I wanted was to make a page of 17 links and clicking Man-upload would upload C:\publi~1\dominions2\GameName\man.2h and clicking Man-download would ftp down the man.trn

If you click the "search" thing in the upper right of the forum and look for "server" in the subject you will find alot of material on this project

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Why not ask the folks from Stars! Autohost if it would be possible to tweak their perl scripts to work with DOM2 ?

For all of you who don't know Stars! and it's Autohost:

Stars! is a turn-based strategy SF game (spreadsheet in space) which is feature very much the same structures as DOM (map/turn/orders - files, Client/Server mode of the app for multiplayer games). Some did a webbased autohost years ago, which features a rather nice frontend now.
Check it out here .

[ February 25, 2004, 06:44: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The java app that Torvak's done is posted on my site, available for immediate d/l. It's a .jar file, not an .exe, so it should run under linux, right? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It should. Actually i would be glad if someone running linux could test it.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Just finished the next Version and sent it to Arryn. It now has god saving (and loading of course). Saves up to 5 gods per nation together with a text file for description.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Excellent. We are cutting right thru the list. I may have to dream up some new entries for the 3rd party App Wishlist

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Thanks, Ralph! The file is now up on my site for y'all to download.

I'm quite impressed with the amount of traffic my little site's getting. Over 70 unique visitors (not pageloads, I get far more pageloads) on day 1 and another 50+ so far today ...

[ February 25, 2004, 20:36: Message edited by: Arryn ]

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

I admit it's a little bit dirty. Already found out why it wasn't terminating the JVM properly. Tomorrow i think i'll add some nifty "nagot gick fel" windows for file not founds and whatever.

And i'm still waiting for someone to test it on linux http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I just noticed that I'd forgotten to change a tiny bit of HTML code on my files page so that the 0.4 Version would be linked. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

My apologies to anyone who tried to d/l domsaver0.4.jar from my site in the past 2 hours and was unable to. It should work correctly now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon6.gif

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Just remembered another 3rd party App NAME GENERATORS
OK not a biggy. There are alot already available. I messed with writing a few variations and ended up with two that were simple enough to be a routine to add to a program instead of a standalone program.

For commander names I would create long strings of names attached together. Conan Kull Aragorn Xena would become conankullaragornxena. (much longer strings though) The routine grabbed 3,4,or 5 letter Groups out of it and pasted them together. It solved alotof the problems with unpronouncable names. If I dig up my old C64 routine I will covert it. It used an array which made use of the most commonly used letters and letter combination in the english language.

For place names I built arrays of descriptive words and terrain names, then randomly assigned pairs. Such as ....
"Forest", "Woods", "Copse", "Grove", "Woodlands", "Timber", "Timberland", "Woodlot", "Wildwood", "Thicket", "Growth"
"Trees", "Canopy", "Maze", "Woodland", "Wood", "Forestry", "Wilderness", "Willows", "Oaks", "Saplings", "Orchard"

attached after something from a list such as...
"Dark", "Greening", "Darkening", "Forbidden", "Gracious", "Elven", "Elder", "Mythical", "Growth", "Feeding", "Blue"
"Carpenters", "Neutral", "Deep", "Nesting", "Golden", "Pixie", "Ogre", "Land of", "Nether", "Dull", "Wide"
"Twisted", "Wild", "Dreaming", "Lost", "Dew", "Redding"

It allowed for alot of names from fairly short lists. Hmmm maybe this should have gone on the RanGame project for commander/place names to randomized .map files

[ February 27, 2004, 19:48: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Like the Forbidden Thicket of Twisted Pixie Dew? Between that and the Feeding Nesting Nether-Ogre Wilderness, I might never leave my home province!

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Heehee. No I just did one from each list like Dark Forest or Greening Woods. But after seeing those I might re-think that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

[ February 27, 2004, 21:22: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

New addition: I didnt think of it because its definetly in an area of programming I do badly at. A 3rd party program which can plot the fastest course from xxx to yyy. Read in the .map file and array the neighbor commands. Work out the shortest route. An addition would be to add terrain and have it avoid either land or water. Or even figure in terrain factors such as flyers and forest-moving units

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">this would be awesome! hope someone is up to it
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">this would be awesome! hope someone is up to it


I keep waiting for someone to just make some unit sheets. Anyone can do that with screen capture and a paint program (and more patience than I have). Even if they did them one group at a time it would help.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">as pointed out in another topic, just doing it that way requires some touch up as well and we're talking LOTS of pictures, so tons of work.

plus I'd really like to get the 'action' pose .tga 's and I don't think there's an easy way to do that without extracting the pictures.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">as pointed out in another topic, just doing it that way requires some touch up as well and we're talking LOTS of pictures, so tons of work.

plus I'd really like to get the 'action' pose .tga 's and I don't think there's an easy way to do that without extracting the pictures. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well, if you start Dominions with the -xxx option, you should get a completely black battle-field; which should reduce the amount of touch-up you'll need. Of course, if you want _both_ images of the unit (standard and attack) you're in for some work.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Some work. But from what Ive seen it looks like moving one small section and maybe some pixel editing. I mean the barbarain chief moves his sword from above his head to out in front of him.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

I'm not even sure this could be done, I'd like to have a app that would keep a record of your top ten or twenty slain commanders. The ranking could be exactly like the Hall of Fame but with all your units...It would make for a great After-The-Game comparison.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

a watchdog routine for hotseat games that have a slow player. It could watch for the trn files to change and then play a sound.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Psuedo-code follows:

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">We'll need a queue class &quot;queue&quot; and a list class &quot;path&quot;.

The queue class is pretty standard.

The path class is just like a queue, except that it needs to support a &quot;LastArea( )&quot; method, which will return the most recently enqueued
element (addArea is just enq). Also, it will need a contains(x) method which returns true if the path already contains x.

We'll assume that:
- areas are represented by numbers
- travel always takes one &quot;turn&quot;
- there is an adjacency function adj(x, y) which returns true if x is adjacent to y, and false otherwise (e.g. return map[x][y]))
- we start in area 0

path start = new path(0);
queue q = new queue;
q.enq(start);

path ans;
ans = findPath(start);

path findPath(queue q, int goalArea) {
path curPath = q.deq( );
int curNode = curPath.LastArea( );
for (i = 1; i &lt; numAreas; i++) {
if (adj(curNode, i)) {
if (i == goalArea) {
return curPath;
} else {
if (!path.contains(i)) {
path tmp = new path(curPath);
q.enq(tmp.addArea(i));
}
}
}
}

findPath(q, goalArea);
}</pre><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">There might be a bug or two in the above code - I haven't tested it. In any case, it's a pretty straightforward breadth-first search. It's not nearly as efficient as Dijkstra's algorithm, but it is nice in that it keeps around partial paths (another function might prune a path for some game-related reason). I can't say I know anything about extracting data from .map files.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">A simple change to the adj function.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Now it starts getting complicated, and you'll probably want an A* algorithm. I can do that, if you want to go that way.

[ March 09, 2004, 02:18: Message edited by: Tominator2 ]

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

OK in the new patch is a switch to do a scoredump. FANTASTIC work. It creates an html file with tables. Its the numbers instead of a chart, and that one turn only. (I now have that feature turned on in my solo games and a browser open to it on my harddrive)

But the progression is nice to see also. Maybe some webby person could write something that saves the score.html into numbered Versions, and shows them with a next/Last button. Or shows the Last few days all on one page. I dont know tables well enough to know if thats hard. Maybe frames?

I know there are free graphic programs out there. Preferably Linux. A program could extract the numbers from each score.html and maybe even recreate the line-graph scoreboard into a jpg.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

I know there is a really nice 3rd party app for multiple game saves and multiple god saves.

But I was thinking that the --preexec could copy the turn files to a subdirectory before each processing. But then I realized that it wouldnt offer anything since going to that previous save would be the same as just hitting "redo from start" on a turn file.

However, if someone put a counter in it... something easy to change. Have it count the turns or pull the number from the score.html and divide it by the requested save-count. Such as if I had a game called MyGame then this program culd make a directory beneath that called saves. Every 10th processing it could copy the turn files from MyGame to MyGame/saves before doing the hosting.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Good news. The language of my choice (yet another basic) is going to add a "binder" to create standalone programs (windows and linux) so I might go ahead and tackle a few of these.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Does --preexec work? I tried it, and it apparently wasn't recognized...

If anyone's interested, I have a bash script that can be used as a --postexec to to backup the .trn and .2h files for a whole game. It's very kludgy, as it creates an additional file to "remember" the turn number, and it still has path problems, and...

Oh, and since it uses bash, and standard unix commands, it's much easier to use on a Linux machine. To use it on Windows, you'll have to have a set of standard Unix commands installed.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Maybe some VB or VC programmer would like to do a menu driven Version of some of my stuff. I can provide the basic code for things like random opponents or randomized surprises in independent provinces. My Version of basic is cross-platform (linux and windows) so it isnt very good at making a user menu thing.

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

The --preexec fix is in the next patch so I guess we can start programming around it for things like a game-save utility.

Im also looking at the --scoredump which generates a very nice tabled scoreboard. No running lines but nice numbers. Im thinking someone could easily write a program to add all the numbers together for an overall score. ManScore=armies+research+provinces
It might need some sort of formula to give a weighted amount to things like forts (forts*100?).

Im also still hoping someone will write a routine to save the numbers in scoredump and use them to recreate charts. There are plenty of chart routines out there so the actual graph/chart stuff wouldnt need written, just the collector. --scoredump --postexec collector.exe

Re: 3rd party Apps wishlist
 

Looking at my web page for random maps www.dom2minions.com/~dominion/Dominions2/RandomMaps/RandomMaps.html

Im thinking that it might be interesting to do a CGI which will allow making a map. One that allows putting in all of the tons of parameters and then generating a map would be great, then allowing other choices. DomMap, or my various map extending programs, have all of the switches necessary.

Anyway, I thinking....
set the size, amount of water, amount of impassable borders, stuff like that. And then generate a page full of thumbnails of just blank land and sea maps.

Then select from the various color schemes and let it re-do the map adding in the terrains.

then select from various map extensions:
logical province names, special sites, scattered independent owned castles, random monster placements, special AIs, logical independents, middle earth, age of chivalry, etc etc.

It could be carried further into web-based creation of a MOD to go with it. Anyway, then its all zipped up and linked for download. Could be fun. The exe side of it I can handle (dommap, map generation, map extensions) if someone wants to tackle the web-side (form and cgi). It COULD even be tied into Mohansens as a "make a map" option