Maps available

[The_Maxx]

Gandalf Parker,

I fully appreciate the work you're doing, and I constantly come here to check for any updates that involve your map project. In fact, I basically come here only to see what progress youve made.

Love your random map craziness, my buddy and I play them religiously (adds to the atmosphere going up against an army of pretender gods right at the beginning with only you're dinky start army, and if you're lucky a powerful random mercenary start group).

Keep up the work. I hope to see many new maps. I prefer smaller maps to the ones you currently have, btw - Ill never finish a 450 province map, ever, ever.

The_Maxx

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Targa:
Gandalf: I tried looking at

quote:

---

OK if you want to see what Arralens routine does to the DomMap generated maps then here is an example...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/way2hard.tga
(and YES its huge but its still in work)

Also if you are interested in the types of maps that can be auto-generated by GIMP then check this one out...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/rendered.tga

But the pages come up blank.??

---

They are tga so you need a viewer that can see them. Try right-clicking the link and saving it to your machine then viewing it.

I would love to see GIMP compared to the other maps. Looking at the maps from your Last post, I would have to vote:
6) drop the DomMap and shift attention to the GIMP rendered maps because they are prettier

I could probably get something going which would generate piles of rendered maps from GIMP. But they wouldnt be playable. They would be good starts at an image that someone could MAKE a game map out of.

Part of the advantage of DomMap is that it also creates the .map file. Unless someone wants to write a seperate .map generator I would have to say the GIMP project is a ways off. On the other hand, a blur of the DomMap images does great.

The layouts are great, but as you said, you need some type of gaussian blur for the pixelation. I would like to give back to the community, which is my normal modus operandi when I'm hooked on a game, and it usually involves something with graphics...

Great. Me too. My community service usually involves something like moderating forums. That and hosting a site. Im doing alot more in programming, graphics, and web for this game than I usually do but thankfully so far no one has flamed me for it.

Actually I looked at this thread because I was thinking of posting a new thread asking if there was any real interest in new maps. I would like to see something a bit better-looking than the crosshatch-paper-texture maps done with pastel colors that come with Dom2.

We have had a couple done that were satellite photographs. But they come up slowly. I think people would like to see alot of variety. Please do some.

For my part I will be working more toward simple, faster download, randomly generated, mass produced stuff which should help make yours look real good.

Is it worth the time investment? You seem to be having difficulty getting a positive response from the community:

I like to remind them occassionally to thank the people here who do things. The concept of how to "pay for free things" so the people who make them feel like making more. Its not for me so much since I can see from my server logs how much traffic my stuff gets.

My maps get quite abit of download but its the worked ones that really get the traffic. The ones that do fun random things to the instructions in the .map file. Im working my way back toward the amount of automatically generated daily offers I had with Dom1.

[Targa]

I shoulda known that IE couldn't display .tga's.

I see the difference now, and I actually like the DomMap pictures better. Is there any way you could adapt the program so you could "feed" it a picture file, and it would insert province borders and the white dots in the middle of each, along with generating a .map file? Perhaps specifying that shades of blue would be water and anything else would be land? (don't know a thing about coding). I whipped up a quick map in Bryce...if I had a web site I'd post it. But it's just a picture. The thought of hand-drawing all the province borders and white dots, along with making a .map file...ugh. Not to mention the unpassable borders by mountain ranges...hmm, that could be a problem for an auto-program.

[Gandalf Parker]

It can be done but not by me Im afraid. I can work out alot of the steps (what programmers call psuedo-code) but turning it into a program is probably out of my league.

[Gandalf Parker]

New thing going on here. Im not so good at understanding all of setings for DomMap so Ive come up with a hacker fix. Im running maps on almost completely random settings and saving the scripts that generate something I like. Many of them fail with errors saying xxxx cant be larger then yyyy and stuff like that. But Im getting some interesting results.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ndomMaps/junk/
Even though the results are playable I didnt expect to get more than junk (hence the directory name) so only the jpgs were put there but Im considering changing that. Is anyone else running the Dom2 Version of DomMap? Should I put these scripts there for viewing?

If you see one you really like and are quick with an email I can zip it and put it there for pickup.

On an added note... I am considering dropping the nightly runs of the Dom1 Version DomMaps.

Gandalf Parker
-- to email me replace Parker with @community.net

[ January 27, 2004, 16:11: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Targa]

How about making maps/pictures, but without any colors other than water? If you had the .map file and a .tga file with borders/capitals, it could be used as an overlay layer on a user-made map. I was going to try this with the ones you have, but the "speckled" colors make it too difficult.

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Targa:
How about making maps/pictures, but without any colors other than water? If you had the .map file and a .tga file with borders/capitals, it could be used as an overlay layer on a user-made map. I was going to try this with the ones you have, but the "speckled" colors make it too difficult.

I'm not sure I understand?

Do you mean that I should make a two colour map without capitals and borders? I could easily do a hundred of these, but would they be of any interest.

Or do you mean that I should make maps without borders and capitals?

Or do you mean that I should make borders and capitals without maps?

Or do you mean something in between?