Any interest in a RMG?

[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

[Agrajag]

Oh please dont make me guilty of blowing you away. The other rmg appears to have stopped in development and you were on such a roll. But on the other hand I would be the last person to recommend that anyone not pursue the parts they feel are fun.

So far I'm still having fun with it, and I'd dare say I'm not at all far from getting it to a usable beta state.
It can currently generate maps, place provinces and draw borders. It still needs some improvement on the last two until they are correct. After that there's actually generating the .map files (which shouldn't be hard, as I already store information of all neighbours and the terrain bitmask.).
After that, all that's left is making everything customizable rather than having almost all values hard-coded, and making the maps look graphically prettier.
Then I can release version 1.00 and start improving it based on suggestions

Oh, and if you feel like blowing new wind into my sails, then you are doing so with your inclination to host some maps generated with this RMG on your site.
This is because I'm about to add a few things which will be quite computationally expensive

Well it works for me anyway you want to do it. As for the colors.. Old Dom 1, and DomMap, both went with speckling the province with color. So one possible choice would be assigning a color to each basic terrain, and a setting for variation. Such as brown to mountain, and yellow to waste, then have the program speckle the two colors together for provinces which were mountain-waste. If the variation variable is set to 3 then the game could randomly use -3/+3 of the brown for each mountain pixel and -3/+3 of yellow for each waste. That would give a nicely blurred effect. Not so stark. And provide some effect provinces which are entirely mountain or entirely waste.

I saw it and I didn't really like it. I'm more inclined to have a single color per basic terrain and have the resulting color just be an average of all colors that apply (that's what it's like right now, except all values are hard-coded). The real variation should come by also assigning an image (or images) to each terrain type (like little mountains and trees) and have the program spread all applicable images on the terrain.
(Of course, there's always the option of providing more than one option )

I don't want to hijack another thread

I'm actually quite interested in what you have, since in a way you are a competitor

[lch]

Snoddasmannen said:
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

Oh, don't get your hopes up too high - I'm usually suffering from the "too many things at the same time" syndrome. But yes, somebody might help and improve the code for you. At least everybody would have the chance to do so, then.

[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

[Gandalf Parker]

By the way, the reason for the press on .map file rewriters giving data on provinces was so that they would work with scripts like mine for yet another .map re-writer to add things like reasonable province names (woodland names, swamp names, mountain names, island and lake names, etc). Also placement of natives such as rewriting a map to fit a theme such as all mounted nations in plains, or all vampires in towns, or nations of hobbits and flyers and monsters. (things later worked into Ballbarians excellent program)

[Agrajag]

Adding some metadata to the .map files isn't hard, though any information written could be simply gotten from actually interpreting the .map file (For example, instead of checking "if (province_string.contains_string("wood")" you could just check "if (terrain_mask.to_int() & 128)"

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.

Since I don't really remember that randomizer, I'm curious about it. What "cool stuff" did it really have? What do you mean by "scatter icons"? (Do you mean using images of trees in forest provinces, mountains in mountains etc., or are we talking about crowns for VPs and volcanoes for sites?)
(Adding custom colors and images for trees and stuff would be easy, and definitely part of the plan.)