[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted :
- are the wrap around maps spherical (4 directions ) or cylindrical (2 directions) in their wrap?
-- Spherical (4 directions).
--- I have problem understanding what exactly does wrap-around. As province linking can be altered to our own choice (eg linking the provinces of two opposite edges), I suppose that the wraparound option is only used for scrolling purpose?

Im guessing so. Since they have removed the "guessing" part of Dom 1 where you didnt have to specify which provinces are neighbors to each other. Now its a mandatory part of the map (something Im expecting to growl about). So its probably just that IF you build your map to be wrap-around then you can tell the game to allow the players to scroll the map. Which also means that the answer of spherical, cylindrical, or torus, doesnt really apply. The map maker can decide to do any of these.

Also, am I right in assuming that you have no link detection algorithm in doms II, or does the one of Doms I still present, but optional?

Right, for some reason they seem to have taken that out. They felt it "didnt work right" which I really never noticed. I played maps all the time where I had no neighbor commands without seeing any more irritating non-connects than existed purposely on player-made maps. And the old way you could always add a neighbor line to fix one rather than have a ton of them. I hate to see what the map file for one of my 450 province maps are going to be like now.

will we have a library of pre made sprites for forests and mountains? If no, do you feel its ok (for a fan made map) to use graphics from old games, like Heroes of Might and Magic III? I dont want to be accused of copyright infrigment (sp?)...

They said they would provide some but it might take abit for all the formating. It will probably be just a TGA file you can take from but you can do that with the maps that come with the game, or the demo. Maybe a GIMP brush file since thats what seems to be used (good choice) and then eventually the Users will create brush files for photo shop and corel draw and others.
You could grab the Dom2 example they put out and snag whats in the eye.tga

I printed out the eye.tga and have it here while I search the net trying to find a close match. Some sort of random generator would be great. Maybe some other old game that had a utility to generate maps that look at least close to what the Dom2 maps have. So far "close to" is about 50% off-target.

[ October 24, 2003, 13:01: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]