Any interest in a RMG?

[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.)

[Gandalf Parker]

Here is the thread on that generator..
New Map Generator
And a later thread on my efforts to make the maps available the public.
Wrapped Maps Available!

Here are some examples from various rmg's:
DomMap
MapGen wrappable
MapGen 1500 provinces wrappable

[Gandalf Parker]

Another example. This is a Tower map.
Tower_1
I found some interest in this as a different type of game. Generating 1500 provinces only wide enough for the game to place one nation at a time stacked. Each player only had to concern themselves (mostly) with the nation on top or below them. There were also pipeline maps which were the same concept but running sideways instead of up and down. Maps like this would be great if they would wrap top-bottom for Tower and left-right for Pipeline.

Which reminds me. Does your generator mark off bad starting locations? Is that configurable as to the number of neighbors for consideration? Does it not mix land and sea neighbors in that count?

Feel free to turn me off anytime you want. This is one of my attributes (pro or con) that I store and generate lots of "and this too" ideas. By the way, seperate parameter files will be great. It will make it easy for me to script randomization within acceptable parameters between runs.

[HoneyBadger]

This thread makes me wonder if anyone's ever thought of a community effort map? We could take a 1500 province map-maybe Agrajag could make us a set to choose from? Gandalf could set the perimeters, and everyone could pick a portion of it to design provinces, do supplimentary artwork, write background for it, etc. I'd be willing to volunteer to coordinate the effort, as my time allows, as long as I was exempt from doing any heavy computer lifting-all I've got is my work computer and 3 busted up laptops.

[Gandalf Parker]

a couple of variations on that idea, yes.
But by all means, please feel free to try again. Start a thread.

[HoneyBadger]

I'll do just that.

[Agrajag]

Hmm, Pardox's RMG looks pretty sweet. Probably sweeter than what I could finish before being drafted into the military
And it doesn't look like there's anything specific for me to do that he didn't already. (Since he has wrap around maps, and you said he has icons)
So perhaps I should just work on my RMG for fun when I feel like it?

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.

I agree. (Which is why if I had done that, I would have made it as another program)

It's a well-known rule that implementing something from scratch is probably to be better for yourself and the program than to take stuff from somebody else and then try to understand how it works and patch it in places to add functionality. But having a reference is good in any case. Comments are optional as long as function names and variables are sensibly chosen and there's clear indentation.

That's true to some extent, but not universal law.
For example, if you picked up my code, you could have "stolen" fractal.cpp and fractal.hpp and used them as-is on any program, since they provide a pretty much self-contained "package" for generating fractal heightmaps.

Maps like this would be great if they would wrap top-bottom for Tower and left-right for Pipeline.

If paradox's generator can generate wrap-around maps (which it can according to what you've shown me), then I'm guessing that it would be trivial to generate wrap-around towers and pipes.

Which reminds me. Does your generator mark off bad starting locations? Is that configurable as to the number of neighbors for consideration? Does it not mix land and sea neighbors in that count?

Of course, it does nothing yet, but it would be fairly easy to do such a thing, as it will be forced to generate a map of neighbours to generate a .map file, so just counting the number of same-terrain neighbours is easy.

By the way, seperate parameter files will be great. It will make it easy for me to script randomization within acceptable parameters between runs.

I think the best solution would be taking one command line parameter as the name of the config file (and default to something if there is no parameter given), don't you think?
Though thinking about it thoroughly, I have to give a "warning", to be as customizable as possible will also give pretty big config files. (for example, if you wanted to control the color of every possible combination of terrain tags you'd have to manually define colors for ~70 different combinations. [theoretically you'd have 8388607 combinations, but most of them don't really make sense together, or don't really deserver their own color. nor would they be possible.] )
Or are you talking about separate files for separate parts of the data? (like a file for colors, a file for thresholds, a file for heightmap settings etc.)

Re: Honeybadger
Your community map thread doesn't seem to jive well with my random maps, since you have people predefine what their provinces are like, and you aren't guaranteed to get a map that fits their desires. A more sensible approach for using a random map would be to select one map and then give sections of it to certain people.
(This applies to any random map, not just my own)