report from Dom2Minions.com

[silhouette]

Gandalf,

Happy Birthday (belated ).

I have downloaded and used several of your scenarios and random maps, and I appreciate the work to set them up and keep them available. Mostly I use the random maps for SP play, and sometimes DomMap new ones of my own.

I think we have similar opinions on how the random map generator weaknesses expose themselves. The assignment of poptypes from a standard (smart?) list would be a great addition. The visual map creation code has improved nicely for just a fractal/displacement terrain generator, but it does lack in some areas:
* there seems to be still a lot of large blocky areas of the same terrain type -- this makes about half of the maps visually undesirable for me, and unfair I think also
* the "scale" of the map to be generated does seem to matter during the terrain generation step, and I think it should. You should be able to look at the map texture alone without province boundaries, and be able to tell if it is small or epic (more ruggedness the larger the map, 25000 ft view vs 5000 ft view level of detail)
* lots of more/different gimp "Prettifying" options which could be scripted optionally (despeckle instead of gaussian blur to cleanup, canvas texture depth 2 is good for a Aran/DesetEye look, self-bump map for a 3-d look, script-fu fuzzy border, etc)
* Changing the color schemes can add a lot to changing the feel of a map, but I find that trying to stamp on visual addition details like mountains, forest trees, etc, just emphasizes the problem that the terrain doesn't make sense geologically. There are no mountain _ranges_ just blobs, forests only seem to exist between mountains and plains, wastes are as likely next to swamp as farmland, etc. There are other applications that generate random terrain on geological basis, but that may be moving too far from the fun parts.

What do we know about what Dom3 will have for pre-defined Gods/nations? Do you think there is much value at this point in packaging your starter gods, maybe with Zen's mods, for new players at all?

Sill

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmm there is alot there. OH thanks on the birthday wish. Yeah it was yesterday. Im telling everyone not to sweat it. Its next year on my demi-centennial that I want alot of do about it. Everyone can give me my mid-life crisis presents then.


Logical independent positioning is is definately possible. So is logical assignment of names of provinces (the Dark Woods, Shambler Lake, Rigid Mountains) or logical placement of magic sites. The .map file has info on terrain and neighbors which can be read and interpretted, then add commands for logical assignment of those things instead of random each time the map is played on.

The large blocky areas can be broken up more by switches to dommap but the results are always a range. Improving the settings I use would at this point have to get into seperate settings for each of the 6 map sizes I run.

GIMP effects are good. Unfortunately I run the maps on a linux with no Xwin gui environment. Getting a gimp script to run non-interactively is supposed to be possible but I never got it to work. So at the moment Im limited to command-line options. Ones that are in dommap such as the blur, or ones made available with ImageMagick, things like that.

I might add back the option for "blank" maps (no terrain except just brown land or blue water) so more people can build on them by pasting in terrain icons.

Gandalf Parker

[Psitticine]

Happy (belated) birthday, GP!!!