new map generator

[paradoxharbinger]

once again, i must apologize for my extended absence (getting kind of old, huh?).

i hope that all of you are not too annoyed with me, when i started this project, it was meant to be a way for me to learn a new programming language in an interesting way. after a while it became a way for me to improve my algorithm techniques and even after that, a way for me develop some interesting algorithms of my own, so sometimes i just get derailed into something completely unrelated.

anyway, i have been making some progress. i've recently gone in an entirely new direction with some of the new algorithms, which turns out to be a double win, because even as the algorithms have become more simple, the desired results have also become so much easier to achieve.

i've attached a screen to show what i am now working with. it is a contrived example, but the beauty is that such a result would not be difficult to randomly generate. blue is water, red is land and green is the coast line.

i am going to combine this with the grids to make the edges more jagged. hopefully more on that soon.

@gandalf
unfortunately, seems that the old mapgen is rather more inflexible than i thought, i suppose i never imagined all of the ways people would try to use it, though i tried, but that's what public testing is for, right? in any case, my suggestion would be to try raising the water level. in truth, i haven't looked at that code in so long, i can barely remember how it works, and it was such a mess that it gave me head aches when i went back to try and fix the naming issue that you mentioned. my programming style has advanced quite a bit since i wrote that stuff and to think that i wrote that atrocious code makes me shudder.

[Gandalf Parker]

Been there, done that.
Looking at code I wrote years ago either has me laughing or amazed that I wrote it.

[Gandalf Parker]

Very strange. Apparently the secret to getting continents and oceans lies in the ZOOM command. I thought that was zoom like it is in Dom3 but apparently it ties into the code.

Setting zoom to 5.00 got me provinces with very dot-scattered edges. And setting it to 0.25 got me provinces and oceans and also took away the mixed-terrain provinces.

I guess that after I run the maps then I will need to include a fix to the zoom in my script that fixes things like map name and description.

[paradoxharbinger]

yeah, zoom is a little odd. if i remember correctly, this is approximately how it works: imagine you are standing over a map, looking down at it, zoom determines how close your face is to the map. it can dramatically affect how things actually look. i cant remember all of the things i tied it into, nearly everything i expect, but i do recall that it did not lend itself very well to several applications, such as growing terrains.

[Gandalf Parker]

Actually thats how I thought it worked. But apparently it has a big affect on how provinces are drawn, and how they are grouped.

Its a good thing to have found. I can get maps that are alot like Dom3s as far as continent/ocean. Or ones as scattered as I was getting before and thinking I was stuck with it.

The problem I have now is that the settings I had randomly stumbled upon for getting a decent spread of terrains (especially mountains) are no good. I have to start over changing numbers until I stumble on a working ratio.

Can you give me an idea of pthresh, tsize, psize, and some which might be in the program but I dont know it?

[paradoxharbinger]

i think if you scale your old values in proportion to how you scaled the zoom that will set you up. if not, i can start messing around with the old mapgen a bit to figure it out.

[DrPraetorious]

No no no, this is good. We *want* the maps to be more clumped .