Seeking map or need advice on making it

diamondspider · #1 February 2nd, 2004, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
OK I played with that generator abit. Made a new Version of its palette adding some mountain colors on the end. Played with the numbers. Anyway it didnt take long to get this...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp4.jpg

That is a pretty nice base. In my own mind, it completes about 15% of the work though.

Very nice start, but the inner terrain is always time consuming if you want a "professional" look.

STILL, the coastline is always a real boring pain to do and isn't nearly as fun as the terrain, so it is a GREAT thing to automate

Whatever Targa did to get him map looking like that will probably be needed in any case. I like his idea of having a tutorial on how he did it.

Maybe he has ideas on how to tweak the automated process to cut out a step or two?

[ February 02, 2004, 14:45: Message edited by: diamondspider ]

Targa · #2 February 2nd, 2004, 05:40 PM

Quote:

Maybe he has ideas on how to tweak the automated process to cut out a step or two

Not really.

The only thing that I can think of that would be of any use to the Dom community as of this moment would be for someone to figure out how to compile Phil's DomMap2 to run in an MS Windows environment.

Quote:

Whatever Targa did to get him map looking like that will probably be needed in any case. I like his idea of having a tutorial on how he did it.

Well, that's kinda like comparing apples and oranges. Unless someone were to code a very complex and powerful program, you'll never get maps that look like Aran from an automatic map generator. So as for "whatever I did to get my map looking like that", it's alot of tedious work by hand, and only "needed" if you want the map to look similar to the maps that came with the game. Phil and Gandalf's priorities are geared more toward Dommap and auto-generation, which doesn't lend itself to the "hand-drawn" look. Gandalf has mentioned (IIRC) that he's been generating random maps in the hopes that people will use them as a base for their own customization/artwork.

Gandalf and I have discussed the possibility of me supplying him with some command-line switches for DomMap2, and he running off a batch of random maps, but we need to coordinate "machine time", since he has other things going on. I sorta left that conversation in limbo...I guess I could get back to it.

As for a tutorial, I'm not sure how many Photoshop Users there are here, and if there are, how many would be willing to go through the time-consuming process of mapmaking. If there's enough of a demand for it, I'll write one.

Gandalf Parker · #3 February 2nd, 2004, 08:35 PM

OK its not an auto-run yet but check out the 02Feb files here
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ndomMaps/junk/

I have the script making those referr to them as "blanks". There is actually a .tga and a .map file for each with all the #terrain and #neighbor commands. There are still some randoms being done such as how many provinces and how much water but those could be locked down to absolute numbers if you wanted. Is this what you guys had in mind?

[ February 02, 2004, 18:36: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Targa · #4 February 2nd, 2004, 09:21 PM

Alot of those look really good as templates! It looks like you may need to tweak the 'shore cost', as a few of them have land province borders bleeding into the sea. Also (using the first pic as an example), I'd experiment with ruggedness between 1.4 - 1.7 or so...enough to eliminate the hundreds of tiny islands, as it would be very difficult to work with otherwise. But yeah....those are looking really good!

That's basically what I've been doing with DomMap. Running off a bunch of pics similar to those until I see a shape I like. Of course, yours are so much better to work with, since they can be way larger than 800x599, and have the corresponding .map files that work with Dom2. I haven't been playing with province numbers, since I've been doing the borders by hand. I've found that no matter what setting I used, DomMap would always end up giving me some province shapes I disliked. Although now that I think about it, since the capitals are what counts, the borders can be made "flexible".

Once I get a map I like the looks of, I copy the seed from the map file, paste it into a batch file, and adjust the other parameters to tweak it.
Here's my "base" switches:
-d 0 -pl 15 -nl 260 -tc 900 -sa 2 -ns 25 -ss 55 -wl 30 -ls 25 -r 1.7

Those get varied a bunch when I get a shape I like though.

The only thing that I see that would need to be modified (other than sprucing up the map with graphics) is that the map file generated by DomMap2 also has terrain info, doesn't it? For example, the pics at the bottom of that page, with the different colors on the land, are showing plains, mountains, etc... If you start with a "basic blank" (all brown) like the top ones, you'd have to add terrain info thru Dom2 map editor (not that that's a big deal).

[ February 02, 2004, 19:26: Message edited by: Targa ]

PhilD · #5 February 2nd, 2004, 10:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Targa:

Once I get a map I like the looks of, I copy the seed from the map file, paste it into a batch file, and adjust the other parameters to tweak it.
Here's my "base" switches:
-d 0 -pl 15 -nl 260 -tc 900 -sa 2 -ns 25 -ss 55 -wl 30 -ls 25 -r 1.7

OK, since I cannot help you get the "new and somewhat improved" dommap to run on your machine, I ran it with your switches for 3 1600x1200 maps; the results are here .

If you want more, you can email me at (duchon) dot (philippe) at (free) dot (fr)

Gandalf Parker · #6 February 2nd, 2004, 10:34 PM

Targa,
The ones I run come from a basic program that runs ALL the parameters as randoms. If there are one or two on my list that seem "perfect" I can quote the variables that were used.

Do you want a nightly run to put a dozen or so into your directory on my machine?

Targa · #7 February 2nd, 2004, 10:44 PM

Phil: Awesome! I saved map #3, which I really like the looks of.

Your mod of DomMap must have changed something other than map size and .map files, because when I use the same seed with DomMap 1 it gives me a totally different picture.

Gandalf: As I mention above, the 2 progs generate diff maps even w/same seed, so giving me the variables wouldn't allow me to generate anything similar-looking. If you could do a nightly run, I can download any I like, which would be awesome. Could you set it up so it uses the same file names every day, overwriting yesterdays files? That way I won't have to delete any, and your hard drive won't fill up.