The Random Map Generator and Maps

[Psitticine]

Nope, it shouldn't be that difficult to make a pretty good random map generator from Dom's needs. I'm starting a killer quarter at school today (I'm both teacher and student . . . eesh) so I'm not going to have time to devote to such a project on top of everything else I've got going now, but there must be somebody about with the skills AND the time.

[Gandalf Parker]

A good place to start might be with the source code for the old map generator.
http://www.ont.com/~keldon/dommap.html

[blackwulf]

I NEED HELP!

In preparation for DOM 2 I have started playing DOM 1 again. I was made aware of Keldon’s Random Map Generator in this thread. I downloaded it and think it’s great. However I had downloaded it to my desk top and wanted to have it in a sub-folder of Dom 1 so I copied and pasted the exe into the folder and went back to delete the original file and it will not let me. No matter what I do including regediting all entries of dommap I cannot remove/uninstall/delete dommap.exe from my computer.

As a side not I had played around with the "run_dommap.sh" shell
Script which is mentioned in Keldon’s read me at his site.

I am running win XP and while this is a minor annoyance I really would like to be able to uninstall this program from my system.

I’d appreciate any suggestions. I emailed Keldorn but don’t know if he is still active and have yet to receive a reply.

Thank you
Blackwulf

[Pocus]

have you first checked that the file is not with read only attribs? It happens when you burn them on a cd.

if writable, then what is the message? Does windows say the file is still used by another app?

try anyway to reboot in safe mode (dont know how it is called in english, this is the mode without the drivers and terminate stay resident loaded).

[blackwulf]

Pocus,

I did indeed check for read only and I tried rebooting in safe mode. No matter what I try it comes back with the following message...

"Cannot Delete dommap:It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again"

I have been troubleshooting this for the Last six hours!

Blackwulf

[Pocus]

can you move the file to another place (I doubt, but try), tell me.
make a windows boot disk then and boot from him. Then browse (you'll need to knows DOS commands) to your file, and delete it del dommap.exe in DOS command. It should works.

if it dont works, well I dunno. You can use your task manager to see which processes are running, and kill all that appears TSR or superfluous to the system.

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
A good place to start might be with the source code for the old map generator.
http://www.ont.com/~keldon/dommap.html

Well, that might indeed be a good place to start, but instead I'm going to mostly ignore it and write a new program from the ground up in C++. Mostly because C++ has the STL and decent string handling routines, and OO design will allow me to write cleaner, more extensible code.

For those who haven't already guessed: this is an announcement that dom2map, a random map generator for Dominions II, is now in development. Some of you may know me from the newsgroup - I made some modifications to Keldon's Dom I RMG, including unique province names based on terrain (this may be unnecessary in Dom II but I'll wait and see), config file support, compressed Targa support and others I won't take up too much space by listing here.

Design goals for dom2map:

• Should be able to run on any system dom2 itself will run on. I hope to be able to achieve this easily by using standard C++ that will compile under a variety of freely available compilers for various platforms, and a command line interface (but see below).
• The first release Version will be able to generate playable maps. Probably the first Version will do no more map scripting than is necessary for playability, and increased scripting capabilities will be added in later Versions.
• As much as possible will be user-configurable using files that can be edited with common text editors (possibly XML, if I can find a good library for handling XML - does anyone here know of one?).
• To be added (hopefully) soon after release: support for wraparound maps, increased scripting capabilities (like some of the things Gandalf is talking about on this and other threads), island hop/sea tunnel links, land/sea borders drawn offshore (like most hand drawn maps), force pop/income/res/supply based on terrain/area (if possible).
• If there is demand I may try to write a frontend that makes it easier to modify some options and launch dom2map from the frontend. Such a frontend would probably be less portable, though - although I will try to use cross-platform libraries if I can. The frontend is definitely (for me) a lower priority than the generator itself, though.

I don't have a release date yet - obviously it will have to be sometime after I get my hands on the full DomII map specs, but I also have a lot of coding left to do.