Maps available

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by mercurycs:
ok, about the size of maps,
SOME ARE HUGE!!!!
but what would be the difference in taking the map's tga file and converting it to jpg and post the jpg. people can download the jpg and then convert it to tga on their own computer so they can use it. there are freeware image converters out there that can be downloaded. I have been running tests on my computer and can see no loss in image quality between jpg and tga so that isn't an issue. a 35 meg tga file is just over 2 megs in jpg format.

As long as the white dots remain purely white there is no problem.

[Kristoffer O]

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.

[Kristoffer O]

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 ]

[Gandalf Parker]

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 ]

[PhilD]

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).

[PhilD]

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 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.

[Gandalf Parker]

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

[PhilD]

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

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 Should be fixed now.

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

[Kristoffer O]

New map avalable in our map gallery.

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

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
New map avalable in our map gallery.

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

Wow! It looks good! Even has the "cloth effect" =)