NI Indies Mod Pack - Version 0.9

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmm.. well a program to me would be very simple. Only a few lines. If I do it on my system to run maps thru it then it wouldnt even have to be a "program" in a programming language. It could just be a text script.

But on seeing your examples it strikes me that a special "library" of small files including those examples and others could be created for Ballbarians SemiRand program to use. That way it would already have a nice menu for running a map thru it or creating a new map with it. It supports things like "only put on coasts". People who like NI play could install the NI library into SemiRand to get mostly-empty-provinces with special ones scattered to whatever percentage they like. Maybe you could look at that after your map is done. After all, at that point you would already have done most of the work (the designs and map commands).

But I do like the "search for the sites" aspect. Basically it adds a level of effort like in other games where you must build a structure or something to get units there.

[rdonj]

Hmm, perhaps so then.

I have to confess, I have absolutely no idea how to do that. I'm not really very familiar with the SemiRand program (seemed extremeley complicated to use) and creating something for it to pull data out of is completely out of my league. I could go to Ballbarian and say "here, take these files and make a library with them that could be used by your SemiRand program" but that is pretty much it.

[Gandalf Parker]

Basically SemiRand reads a map, and assigns special provinces to it. It can "see" if a province is woods, or waste land, or water and assign provinces that match. It can also see things like coast, island, lake, valley, etc. Each of the special provinces is a separate little text file that gets appended to the map with the appropriate changes for province number. So a province "design" can include any map things like setting the name, population, guardians, magic sites, etc. The more designed provinces we can get for it, the better the maps become.

The hard part seems to be to get people to turn in creative province ideas. Particularly helpful if they are already in map-command form. Since you seem to be doing so many of those I just thought Id try and spark your interest in it. If we could just get every player to turn in just one province we would be setup fantastically.

[rdonj]

I will consider it but it still seems a fair amount of work even if I based provinces off of my sites.