Maps available

[Arralen]

what will not work with DOM2:

• using any other format than .tga, at least unless the developer add support for it with a patch. I#m not shure, but I think the SDL library supports other formats as well, but than there's still the problem that other routines have to read the graphic file as well.
• compressing/resampling/resizing the map pics with any paiting programm, unless doing lots of work by hand or maybe someone could write a script for Gimp
  This is because provinces are detected (and flag graphics shown) by pure white pixels (255,255,255/1x1). Making a .jpg from the .tga will result in artifacts, which will shurely kill some of these pure white dots here and produce some more there .. provinces screwed up badly. Resizing/resampling will do basically the same ..
• changing the resolution. In fact, the resolution set in the graphics file doesn't matter at all. (You may set it to 72 dpi or 305 dpi, however you wish. DOM works based on pixels, not graphic size in mm. Changing the number of pixels is resizing/-sampling and will screw up the map. (see above)

What will work is :

• using just sufficient size (in pixels) for each province so that everything on the map is displayed where it belongs, and leaving out any non-map/province areas from the file
• using few (256) colours when making the map. Using big, flat single-color areas doesn't look that neat, but keeps the file size very low, especially as the RLE compression works better the more uniform an image is.

I resized and modified my old DOM1 map, so I have gone through all this hassle before. BTw., did anyone check this map out? Despite being 1600 pixels wide, it's only 1,6 MB big ... . I'm working on an extended Version at the moment, I'll post it (link) when it's finished.

A.

edited: code & spelling, but it doesn't help much..

[ January 10, 2004, 06:36: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[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 ]

[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).

[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 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.