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

There is a utility called DomMap which generates random maps for Dominions (raw C code, source code available). It was written for Dominions 1 where the map images were 16 colors. A few of us have updated bits and pieces so that it works with Dom2 but there is more that I would like to see touched up.

The fractal routine sems to generate alot of variable heighth points but then it squeezes them into 16 colors. Id like to have that part "undone" and see if we cant get a vga smoothing look (I can provide visual examples of all of this if it helps). There are other things we could use but thats a main point for me.

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

Probably not - but I wouldn't mind looking. I take it there is some C source to start with? And would there be a reference on fractals that the original programmer used when writing his code?

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

DomMap is available for download from my site. Go have a look-see.

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

Got it - thanks. I'll check it out.

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

I'll see about taking a look, if I have the time and energy - map conVersion / extraction utilities were among the programs I developed in my previous life, albeit (because of X quirks and needing a bunch of overlays) the maps were all in 256 color mode.

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

As the one who tweaked (not much more than that) dommap so as to move it from dom1 to dom2 format, I can say that the fractal algorithms are basically undocumented.

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

I just took a quick peek at the code and if I'm not mistaken, the relevant code snippet that is responsible for this is to be found in the function "dump_color" in the file "targa.c" (very first function in that source file). Assuming I've correctly ID'd the responsible code segment, "fixing" it should be trivial.

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

Well, it's pretty ugly coding, and it doesn't play well with the prettifying script, but I've hacked something together. Have a look here:

http://home.Online.no/~rmoldskr/Dominions/DomMap.zip

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

Looks MUCH better to me. Thank You. Here is a quick test run on default settings.
http://www.dom2minions.com/~dominion/full_fract.jpg

Now I need to see if it messed up the #terrain code
EDITED: Ok the terrain is fine.

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.

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

I'm afraid not - I didn't really look at the inner loops in much detail. I added a third fractal map, though; which will slow things down a little.

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

Heh... I always wanted to conquer the Great Blue Plains... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
It looks promising, though.

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

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?

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

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. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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

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

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

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 ??

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

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 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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

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. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
I really should try to clean that up.

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

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....
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
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 */
};
</pre><hr />
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.

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

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."

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

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.

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

Very interesting. I take it for granted that the "amount of brightening" and the "amount of shading" variables refer to the range of light and the range of dark that the plains pixel colors will be shifted?

I understand the elevation reference. Whats the "shadow map" reference? Possibly something like the effect we got from using the "bumps" filter? A bit of texturizing so that the color-by-elevation was more landscapey and less smooth? (I havent played with it yet to see)

This is turning out SO nice compared to what I found in all my hunts for a random generator, that it might want to be used outside of the Dom2 community. Would it be hard to add a switch to turn off the dominion items such as capitals and borders?

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

Hmmm the default border color for the water provinces should probably be changed. The MapEdit tool uses red borders to find provinces. I asked and Johan says that he thinks its any color where both gg and bb are below the setting of rr. So we should be able to use red for land provinces and something like a pinkish purple for water which would look pretty good.

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

Pretty much, yes.

The amount of shadowing in position (x,y) depends on the elevation at position (x,y). However, as the terrain in position (x,y) also depend on the elevation, this makes for rather subtle differences; since all the terrain of one type would normally be at similar elevations and thus be brightened or shaded to the same level. (For instance, since almost all low-level elevation positions will be water, you won't see much shading unless you turn on the shading of water.)

To allow for more dramatic shading/brightening, I added an additional "shadows map" which is also used to shade the colours. By changing the factors for the elevation and the shadow shading and brightening, you can change from a very subtle to a more dramatic (but less natural) shading.

I don't know - I haven't looked at that part of the code. My assumption is that it's pretty straight-forward, though.

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

The copy of this file that I host on my website has now been updated with this Version. I also took the liberty of updating the Version number (in dommap.h) to 1.96. Please let me know if you feel that the Version number should be bumped to 2.00.

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

Sounds good to me. Moving it into VGA I feel has fully migrated the old Dom1 Version fully into Dom2

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

Okay, I've updated the Version number to 2.00 and updated my site accordingly.

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

Hmmm I seem to be having problems getting the border to change. There were two places in the code for the border colors. Is the variable changing both?

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

Hey Leif,
here is some of the code PRIOR to the Last change when you made the colors into command-line variables.

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
static long BORDER_COLOR_A = 0xFF0000;
static long BORDER_COLOR_B = 0xFF0000;
static long CAPITAL_COLOR = 0xFFFFFF;

/*
* Colors for each type of terrain.
*/
static long color_map[] =
{
0x32CD32, /* PLAINS DEFAULT Lime Green was C58F54 misnammed WATER */
0x4682B4, /* WATER was 4E7283 now Steel Blue */
0x5B4524, /* MOUNTAIN */
0x7CFC00, /* FARMLAND was 0xC8BE51 now LawnGreen */
0x228B22, /* FOREST was 0x708841 now Forest Green */
0x20B2AA, /* SWAMP was 34969F now Light Sea Green */
0x808080, /* TUNDRA was C4B0A4 now Gray */
0xBC8F8F, /* WASTELAND was AD9374 now Rosey Brown */
0xFF0000, /* BORDER1 was C3572C now Red */
0xFF0000, /* BORDER2 was 2C87C3 now Orange */
0xFFFFFF /* CAPITAL do NOT change this one */
};
</pre><hr />

I dont read C very well. Looking at your new code I can kindof follow what happened with the color_map variables. But I dont see where the things like "static long BORDER_COLOR_A" went to. Is this maybe why I cant seem to get the border colors to accept?

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

Hmm. It works for me. Are you sure you're using the latest code? Except that the land and sea colours are reversed, there doesn't seem to be a problem in setting them from the command line.