Any interest in a RMG?

[Gandalf Parker]

Excellent. I find that RMGs tend to die. People dont want to bother to learn how to use them. What lives is a web-based shopping mall.
Middle of the night generation of many maps in many sizes, colorations, settings. Offer a webpage of thumbnails, clicking a thumbnail takes you to a larger view with a link to download the zip file of the map.

Something like this although my better examples were on the server which is down.
http://game.dom3minions.com/RandomMaps/mids/Mids.htm

What I wanted eventually was to have daily offers of Dominions 3 generated maps like those shown. And DomMap rmg versions, and Harbringers rmg. And versions of maps with Ballbarians randomizer, and Leifs randomizers, and of course my own randomizers. If it can run on linux without a gui, from text parameters in a file or on the command line, then it will fit in easily. I can already automate the nightly run, the thumbnails, the zipping, the web pages, etc.

[llamabeast]

Well whether or not most people learn how to use them, a few of us can make some really good maps using it and get them widely used. Wraparound maps in particular are in very short supply.

Actually I think I might be making a similar point to Gandalf.

[Agrajag]

Re: Gandalf Parker
That's a good idea, and it might be a motivating thought that even if no one downloads my potential RMG, people will still enjoy maps made by it.
And there's no reason why it couldn't work without a GUI. I'm tending towards a config file more than command line, because it is much easier to assume that the config file is correct (and much easier to mess around with).
One thing I'm not sure about, though, is if it will be possible to generate many maps every midnight, because going through the entire process of making a fully playable map might take a lot of time. (Especially that part where borders are calculated and drawn, because the algorithm I have in mind might be quite slow [it would go through each pixel on the map at least 4 or 5 times])
I'm also not very familiar with threading, so no taking advantage of multiple cores
And of course, sadly, you can't automate anything yet seeing as how the server is dead
Re: Llamabeast
Are you sure you are making a point?
And do you really think you could transform a random map into a really good map? Would you even need all the stages involved? (Or would you only need a base image to prettify and work on)

[Gandalf Parker]

Servers are perfect for such things. Projects which can take a full day of computing would be fine. Im not tying up my desktop or slowing my usual activities by having it do some major project in the background all day. Ive often wished that more projects actually took that into account. Generators often give up excellent actions because it makes the generation time too long for anyone to put up with. PbEM style games (like Dominions) often cut out some options because the devs feel that most players would not put up with the time it takes (such as extensive AI thinking). I cant really argue their logic but often I wish it stayed in at least as an option. After all its not like the community here NEEDS 30 maps daily in each of tiny, small, medium, large, huge, mega sizes. Even if I only generated ONE map a day it would be a huge boost.

One example is that the DomMap generator was forever without a blur routine even though it made the maps much easier on the eyes. I wrote a script to take the generated maps, save the white pixels, blur the map, restore the white pixels, and resave. It was very time intensive but added a nice new optional group to the maps.

Oh and only one of my servers went down. The main one. The old one (which originally housed Dom2minions) is still up and still running games. I could shift everything to it but I dont expect the main server to be down that much longer.

[lch]

Zentar said:
I think there is already a RMG out.

The RMG that went the furthest so far is the one from paradoxharbinger, who hasn't posted about it since a long time, half a year at least. So ongoing development is unclear.

Gandalf Parker said:
Excellent. I find that RMGs tend to die.

Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen. As I wrote before, I have some code bits and pieces myself, but I lack the time and commitment to come up with a finished end product, so I'd rather code dive into finished work from somebody else.

[Gandalf Parker]

lch said:

The RMG that went the furthest so far is the one from paradoxharbinger, who hasn't posted about it since a long time, half a year at least. So ongoing development is unclear.

Yes he was just getting to the point of it being extremely useful. He had licked the biggest complaints. He had just made colors fully selectable, and added the ability to scatter icons as the Dom3 generator does. A user-created icons file would be a big addition.

He also had incorporated requests of mine to include data in the .map output that the map generator "knew" which map modifiers had trouble digging up later. Like this..
-- #37, {1642,82}
-- neighbor 32, 49, 65, 879, 897
-- medium
-- swamp
-- forest
and we were working on adding recognition of penninsula, lake, island, etc. Also a breakdown of the bit-code to make it easier for math-incapable people like me to make changes. Altho it was beginning to look like extensive documentation of a map file might be better done as a seperate info file or maybe even a seperate program entirely.

Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

Yes, the DomMap for Dom2 went thru 5 major revisions at least by different people since it was readily available source code (and still is). Even I was able to make some changes in it without knowing C.

I tried to get someone to put it up as an official SourceForge project and it probably would have but Johan's announcement that Dom3 would have a generator kindof killed it. Too bad since it was moving in directions that were diffrent than the Dom3 one ended up doing.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen.

Hmm I have to catch up. I havent looked into that one yet.

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
Yes, the DomMap for Dom2 went thru 5 major revisions at least by different people since it was readily available source code (and still is). Even I was able to make some changes in it without knowing C.

Yeah, I've seen that code. It is horribly inefficient at some places. Since it definitely looks like what the Dom3 map generator produces, I fear that some of the inefficient things went verbatim into the Dom3 one. But I haven't really checked on that. Just a hunch that it might be right. Try creating a 10 provinces map in resolutions 100x100 and 2000x2000, for example, and then time how long the different steps during map creation take to complete. In theory, there shouldn't be that much of a difference, but there is.

Gandalf Parker said:
I tried to get someone to put it up as an official SourceForge project and it probably would have but Johan's announcement that Dom3 would have a generator kindof killed it. Too bad since it was moving in directions that were diffrent than the Dom3 one ended up doing.

Not so much killed it, but rather absorbed it. And since the Dom3 map gen did generate better / prettier output, people dropped it. It's still there, people can still pick it up.

Gandalf Parker said:

Hmm I have to catch up. I havent looked into that one yet.

As I said, announced. Nothing visible yet. Let's wait.

[Snoddasmannen]

lch said:

As I said, announced. Nothing visible yet. Let's wait.

Don't panic, I have been working on it. One of my modus operandi is getting stuck in tiny details which aren't very important. Right now I'm struggling with province borders around coastal areas. One of the things I'm sure somebody like lch would fix up in five minutes if I released the source

Tell you what, I'll try to focus on getting something which compiles, runs and generates a map. Then all of us who feel like it can work on the fun stuff together.

I'm away from home for the weekend visiting with my gf's family, but I will see if I can post a thread with a screenshot when I get back. I don't want to hijack another thread

[lch]

Gandalf Parker said:
He also had incorporated requests of mine to include data in the .map output that the map generator "knew" which map modifiers had trouble digging up later. Like this..
-- #37, {1642,82}
-- neighbor 32, 49, 65, 879, 897
-- medium
-- swamp
-- forest
and we were working on adding recognition of penninsula, lake, island, etc. Also a breakdown of the bit-code to make it easier for math-incapable people like me to make changes. Altho it was beginning to look like extensive documentation of a map file might be better done as a seperate info file or maybe even a seperate program entirely.

I'd really separate those things into a good, fast, efficient map generator and a .map interpreter / commenter. No need for yet another complex unhandy bloat program.

[Agrajag]

lch said:
Which is why I'm not really interested in anything where the source isn't being released. Projects die because people commit their time to other things, that's normal. But it would be good if somebody who wants to tackle the problem can have a look at how it was done before, even if just as a reference, instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again. This seems to happen rather often with things here, though.

What I'm putting my money on right now is the announced map generator from Snoddasmannen. As I wrote before, I have some code bits and pieces myself, but I lack the time and commitment to come up with a finished end product, so I'd rather code dive into finished work from somebody else.

If I make a RMG, I'll definitely release the source.
Though I'm not sure how easy it would be to dive into it, what with no comments, and no programming skill on my part
Maybe you can drown in it

I meant to write this RMG because I wanted to contribute to the whole community, so releasing the source seems obvious to me (otherwise, how would maccers and linuxers enjoy this? And what if someone wanted to do something with it after I'm gone?)

Re: Gandalf's last post
I see what you mean, this is partly why I wanted to make the thing in several pieces, so that you could use only as much of it as you wanted.

Re: Gandalf's previous post
That's an interesting point, though I was thinking it might take hours (not days) if you plan on making many maps with many options.
The reason being that there might be a whole lot of different settings to mess with*, on the generation part and on the image creation part. (as well as the border drawing part, though that's just an on/off thing).
Which is also why I wanted to separate the different stages, so that if you find a map you really like from the generator, but don't like the textures used, you could just rerender the map without generating a whole new map, or maybe you don't like how I draw the borders, so you want a borderless version.

*-for example, per request, you might be able to:
1) Change the amount of "maps" generated (and by that I mean the precipitation and height map I previously exlained)
2) Change the correlation between each terrain type and maps (so you could decide map3 governs mountains.
3) Change the different thresholds for each terrain type (increase the range of heights that correspond to mountains to make a more hilly map)
4) Change the roughness of each map (for a more "shotgun" look, or a more smooth look)
5) Change the colors of each combination of terrain types
6) Change the textures of each terrain type (like different images for mountains)
So if you want a truly varied array of maps, you are going to conjure up a lot of maps. (even if each previously listed example was just a binary choice, you would still end up with 2^6 = 64 maps for each size category.)

EDIT: I was writing this while the very latest post from Gandalf wasn't there yet :S
EDIT 2: Yeah, I don't remember an announcement from Snoddasmannen either :S