Any interest in a RMG?

[lch]

Zentar said:
I think there is already a RMG out.

The RMG that went the furthest so far is the one from paradoxharbinger, who hasn't posted about it since a long time, half a year at least. So ongoing development is unclear.

Gandalf Parker said:
Excellent. I find that RMGs tend to die.

Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen. As I wrote before, I have some code bits and pieces myself, but I lack the time and commitment to come up with a finished end product, so I'd rather code dive into finished work from somebody else.

[Gandalf Parker]

Agrajag said:
Re: Llamabeast
Are you sure you are making a point?
And do you really think you could transform a random map into a really good map? Would you even need all the stages involved? (Or would you only need a base image to prettify and work on)

He might mean that many of the maps being offered were generated by something. Altho I did my best to offer as complete maps as I could, I still always made a point to say that people could feel free to take one that had a lay-out they liked and make it better, then make it available for download under their name.

Just my opinion, but people seem to like generators that can give them something to work with more than a completely finished product. The map-makers all have some part of the map they feel they can improve on, but not necessarily all of the map.

Something along the line of....
"I generated 100 maps. One was a continent surrounded by water with good choke points. So I edited the map to give it decent province names, changed a couple of badly placed provinces, scattered some interesting graphics that fit what was in the province, added a few special story provinces such as the Valley of Dragons and the WereWolf Town. Finally I added Ermor as a forced AI player in a heavily defendable location with a specially designed immortal."

[Gandalf Parker]

lch said:

The RMG that went the furthest so far is the one from paradoxharbinger, who hasn't posted about it since a long time, half a year at least. So ongoing development is unclear.

Yes he was just getting to the point of it being extremely useful. He had licked the biggest complaints. He had just made colors fully selectable, and added the ability to scatter icons as the Dom3 generator does. A user-created icons file would be a big addition.

He also had incorporated requests of mine to include data in the .map output that the map generator "knew" which map modifiers had trouble digging up later. Like this..
-- #37, {1642,82}
-- neighbor 32, 49, 65, 879, 897
-- medium
-- swamp
-- forest
and we were working on adding recognition of penninsula, lake, island, etc. Also a breakdown of the bit-code to make it easier for math-incapable people like me to make changes. Altho it was beginning to look like extensive documentation of a map file might be better done as a seperate info file or maybe even a seperate program entirely.

Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

Yes, the DomMap for Dom2 went thru 5 major revisions at least by different people since it was readily available source code (and still is). Even I was able to make some changes in it without knowing C.

I tried to get someone to put it up as an official SourceForge project and it probably would have but Johan's announcement that Dom3 would have a generator kindof killed it. Too bad since it was moving in directions that were diffrent than the Dom3 one ended up doing.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen.

Hmm I have to catch up. I havent looked into that one yet.

[Agrajag]

lch said:
Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen. As I wrote before, I have some code bits and pieces myself, but I lack the time and commitment to come up with a finished end product, so I'd rather code dive into finished work from somebody else.

If I make a RMG, I'll definitely release the source.
Though I'm not sure how easy it would be to dive into it, what with no comments, and no programming skill on my part
Maybe you can drown in it

I meant to write this RMG because I wanted to contribute to the whole community, so releasing the source seems obvious to me (otherwise, how would maccers and linuxers enjoy this? And what if someone wanted to do something with it after I'm gone?)

Re: Gandalf's last post
I see what you mean, this is partly why I wanted to make the thing in several pieces, so that you could use only as much of it as you wanted.

Re: Gandalf's previous post
That's an interesting point, though I was thinking it might take hours (not days) if you plan on making many maps with many options.
The reason being that there might be a whole lot of different settings to mess with*, on the generation part and on the image creation part. (as well as the border drawing part, though that's just an on/off thing).
Which is also why I wanted to separate the different stages, so that if you find a map you really like from the generator, but don't like the textures used, you could just rerender the map without generating a whole new map, or maybe you don't like how I draw the borders, so you want a borderless version.

*-for example, per request, you might be able to:
1) Change the amount of "maps" generated (and by that I mean the precipitation and height map I previously exlained)
2) Change the correlation between each terrain type and maps (so you could decide map3 governs mountains.
3) Change the different thresholds for each terrain type (increase the range of heights that correspond to mountains to make a more hilly map)
4) Change the roughness of each map (for a more "shotgun" look, or a more smooth look)
5) Change the colors of each combination of terrain types
6) Change the textures of each terrain type (like different images for mountains)
So if you want a truly varied array of maps, you are going to conjure up a lot of maps. (even if each previously listed example was just a binary choice, you would still end up with 2^6 = 64 maps for each size category.)

EDIT: I was writing this while the very latest post from Gandalf wasn't there yet :S
EDIT 2: Yeah, I don't remember an announcement from Snoddasmannen either :S

[Gandalf Parker]

By the way, the reason for the press on .map file rewriters giving data on provinces was so that they would work with scripts like mine for yet another .map re-writer to add things like reasonable province names (woodland names, swamp names, mountain names, island and lake names, etc). Also placement of natives such as rewriting a map to fit a theme such as all mounted nations in plains, or all vampires in towns, or nations of hobbits and flyers and monsters. (things later worked into Ballbarians excellent program)

[Agrajag]

Adding some metadata to the .map files isn't hard, though any information written could be simply gotten from actually interpreting the .map file (For example, instead of checking "if (province_string.contains_string("wood")" you could just check "if (terrain_mask.to_int() & 128)"

Yes he was just getting to the point of it being extremely useful. He had licked the biggest complaints. He had just made colors fully selectable, and added the ability to scatter icons as the Dom3 generator does. A user-created icons file would be a big addition.

Since I don't really remember that randomizer, I'm curious about it. What "cool stuff" did it really have? What do you mean by "scatter icons"? (Do you mean using images of trees in forest provinces, mountains in mountains etc., or are we talking about crowns for VPs and volcanoes for sites?)
(Adding custom colors and images for trees and stuff would be easy, and definitely part of the plan.)

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
Yes, the DomMap for Dom2 went thru 5 major revisions at least by different people since it was readily available source code (and still is). Even I was able to make some changes in it without knowing C.

Yeah, I've seen that code. It is horribly inefficient at some places. Since it definitely looks like what the Dom3 map generator produces, I fear that some of the inefficient things went verbatim into the Dom3 one. But I haven't really checked on that. Just a hunch that it might be right. Try creating a 10 provinces map in resolutions 100x100 and 2000x2000, for example, and then time how long the different steps during map creation take to complete. In theory, there shouldn't be that much of a difference, but there is.

Gandalf Parker said:
I tried to get someone to put it up as an official SourceForge project and it probably would have but Johan's announcement that Dom3 would have a generator kindof killed it. Too bad since it was moving in directions that were diffrent than the Dom3 one ended up doing.

Not so much killed it, but rather absorbed it. And since the Dom3 map gen did generate better / prettier output, people dropped it. It's still there, people can still pick it up.

Gandalf Parker said:

Hmm I have to catch up. I havent looked into that one yet.

As I said, announced. Nothing visible yet. Let's wait.

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
He also had incorporated requests of mine to include data in the .map output that the map generator "knew" which map modifiers had trouble digging up later. Like this..
-- #37, {1642,82}
-- neighbor 32, 49, 65, 879, 897
-- medium
-- swamp
-- forest
and we were working on adding recognition of penninsula, lake, island, etc. Also a breakdown of the bit-code to make it easier for math-incapable people like me to make changes. Altho it was beginning to look like extensive documentation of a map file might be better done as a seperate info file or maybe even a seperate program entirely.

I'd really separate those things into a good, fast, efficient map generator and a .map interpreter / commenter. No need for yet another complex unhandy bloat program.

[lch]

Agrajag said:
If I make a RMG, I'll definitely release the source.
Though I'm not sure how easy it would be to dive into it, what with no comments, and no programming skill on my part
Maybe you can drown in it

It's a well-known rule that implementing something from scratch is probably to be better for yourself and the program than to take stuff from somebody else and then try to understand how it works and patch it in places to add functionality. But having a reference is good in any case. Comments are optional as long as function names and variables are sensibly chosen and there's clear indentation.

[Gandalf Parker]

Here is the thread on that generator..
New Map Generator
And a later thread on my efforts to make the maps available the public.
Wrapped Maps Available!

Here are some examples from various rmg's:
DomMap
MapGen wrappable
MapGen 1500 provinces wrappable