new map generator

[paradoxharbinger]

are you talking about the manysites terrain type, or the other new sites terrain types, or something like what ballbarian is doing? the magic site terrain types will make it in eventually.

[Manuk]

Theres something I can't resolve. Castles and army icons look too big. When I want to tweak this by psize string the map lose shape. It looks confusing as province borders are set bigger but sprites do not.

[paradoxharbinger]

yes, sizing the map properly can be a bit of a hassle. as of now, you would have to scale the psize, tsize, zoom etc with the dimensions of the map. to keep the same look/feel of the default settings, if you were to double the dimensions (for example) you would double all of the distance related arguments, except for zoom, which would be halved. think of the dimensions of the map as a window. changing the size of the window allows you to see more. zoom represents the distance from the landscape you are viewing. i originally had all of the settings dependent upon the zoom, but decided to change it so that terrain/province sizes were not too dependent upon heightmap. perhaps a command to scale arguments from default depending on map dimensions would help?

[paradoxharbinger]

anyone out there created any interesting maps to share? i'm eager to see what everyone is using this thing for

[paradoxharbinger]

btw: i am developing new algorithms for various aspects of the map generation which will lead to dramatically increased speed (i think) and greater control over terrain generation. i anticipate that things such as number of landmasses, number of oceans, island, island chain, peninsula, lakes, mountain and river borders will be able to be defined by the user through the scripting functionality. the wonderful this is that this increased functionality should actually decrease the running time of the map generation, which will mainly be achieved by making calculations less dependent on the dimensions of the map and more on the features that are being placed in it. i will have more on this later as i move through implementing the ground work for it.

[DrPraetorious]

Actually, whatever you did last time, the speed is now very good.

OTOH, better control over the water is exactly what I need. I've attached a script file which gives reasonable results. I've found that by setting the water level down somewhat, the pthresh up quite high, and the water provinces the same size as the land provinces, I *mostly* avoid the problem I had before - a small number of water provinces with way too many neighbors.

The maps still require some cleanup. You can see a list of change in the file "cleanup.txt".

I've also attached the sprites that Frank made me, which make reasonably handsome terrain. The script I've included uses them.

Anyway, it takes a couple hours to make a good, ~400 provinces mp map, including the post cleanup. What you need to do is find all the provinces with >9 neighbors and fiddle with the borders.

Enjoy.

[DrPraetorious]

Okay, here are the additional scripting commands I want:

I want three or four more "terrain types" named custom1 through custom4. They can have a default tchance of 0.

tchance ter #
Alters the chance that a given terrain is seeded.

tmask ter <bitmask>
Alters the bitmask associated with a given terrain. Should work for mountain and ocean as well.

terfeature ter <site #>
Anytime this terrain is assigned to a province, the site is also placed in that province.

obias ter <value>
I don't know how you're going to be placing wastes-far-from-ocean, but whatever value is used for that bias should be adjustable on a per-terrain basis.

Combined, these will enable me to do deserts (waste + desert site, usually not coastal), tundras (waste + tundra site, can be coastal) and jungles (forest + swamp + jungle site, often coastal.)

Thanks! The last map is working quite nicely.

[Gandalf Parker]

I might have missed it someplace but other than some small spatterings in this thread, I dont see anyplace in the documentation that lists the commands.

Are there any that arent listed in the debug.txt?

[paradoxharbinger]

@drP

like the ideas. i hadnt thought about expanding on the terrain types yet, but i'll keep it in mind so that i don't have to rework everything later.

btw, could you expound on tmask ter #? nt sure what youre looking for here

@gandalf

i didnt list the commands in the readme because i set up a web page listing them. i'm a bit lazy, so you'll have to forgive me. you can find most of the commands here.
the commands that i've added since v0.50 are in the changelog, i havent gotten around to updating the site on account of school sucking at my soul, but it'll be updated eventually.

[DrPraetorious]

Well, right now, if a province contains a lot of forest, it's bitmask gets bitwise-or 96.

Well, suppose you don't want forests - you want magic-site-richness. Or smallness. Or waste+swamp.

You could go
#tmask forest 96

And anything that the mapgen assigns as "forest" would now be swamp+waste (mask 96) instead of forest (mask 128.)

There are any number of reasons why you might want to swap out the existing terrain types for other combinations; I'm working under the assumption that this would be easy to code - if not, don't worry about it.