Dominions II mapfile parser

[CJN]

Gandalf Parker said:
Only my own comment. If others dont jump in then its not worth doing anything about it. It depends on what you program in..

Don't worry about that, I program it mostly to improve my programming skills.

Code:

---

<random>(46):

        NOSTART

        forest small

        neighbours: ['37', '55', '68']

<random>(62):

        NOSTART



        neighbours: ['58', '76']

<random>(82):



        neighbours: ['73', '78', '81', '84', '89']

<random>(100):

        forest mountain

        neighbours: ['85', '87', '91', '97']

---

Its a very readable format for user info which may be all it needs to do. But not good for programming. If there is no terrain you leave a blank line. Actually 0 terrain is plains (default) so you might want to make that change. But if there is no blankline for NOSTART. That means that in a program the code would be something like "find swamp, check next line for neighboring 32, back up one or two lines to get province number for including special site location".

Im not sure if everything can be placed on one line and still be good for user reading, but possibly the NOSTART and terrains could be on the same line as the province number. That would make parsing abit easier, and make the neighbor line always be in the same spot in relation to those.

How about:
Line 1: Name, id
Line 2: Terrain
Line 3: Neighbours
Line 4: NOSTART, START, VP, etc.
Line 5->: commanders, features, population, buildings

There is also the problem that there are two ways to add nostart. As a terrain flag and as a separate command. Should the output differ for them?

I will consider these changes and adding counting of number of land-sea neighbours to next Version. It will take to after Christmas before I have time however.