Seeking map or need advice on making it - Page 5

diamondspider · #41 February 2nd, 2004, 12:25 AM

Yes, I'm a big fan of smaller maps.

Why?

1) it is a pain in the neck finding many people who will actually stay around for a game requiring 10+ hours of time,

2) after about turn 40, the micromanagement can get pretty painful in this game, how much more fun is it really to have a few huge spells but spend so much time twiddling with troops?

3) this game, I find, can be very exciting when played on small maps with fewer players, so why hassle with 1 and 2 above when a few players, faster cycles, and less micromanagement is not only possible, but very fun in its own right.

So, long story short, yes, I request a smaller Version (or simply larger territory areas) of your excellent map!

P.S. as a little aside, I just got done playing a 1v1 game on a 39 province map. On turn 18 I got near the enemy capital (played by another human in a network game) and we managed to crash the game due to him having about 20 skeleton summoning C'tis mages. In my mind, this shows that smaller maps are more reasonable since it is currently so easy to exceed the army max and crash the game.

[ February 01, 2004, 22:41: Message edited by: diamondspider ]

Gandalf Parker · #42 February 2nd, 2004, 01:41 AM

Just add to the discussion..
Here are some examples of the 3 map-making scripts in GIMP
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp1.jpg
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp2.jpg
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp3.jpg

GIMP is a powerful free paint program used by many programmers (including the developers of Dom2). These scripts generate random maps. Changing the settings is easy. Changing the color pattern is possible but it involves playing with the palette. Creating a gradient palette which it does make fairly easy after you play with it abit. I could switch to automatically creating these instead of the DomMap stuff except these dont fill my needs. Im not patient enough to add the rest.

GIMP does have layers capability and edging tools which I think could be used to trace borders around major color areas. Then it would just be dividing the areas that are still too big, and adding the white pixel to each. I offer this option to you people to play with because its heading in the wrong direction for me at the moment.

[ February 01, 2004, 23:41: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

diamondspider · #43 February 2nd, 2004, 01:48 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Just add to the discussion..
Here are some examples of the 3 map-making scripts in GIMP
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp1.jpg
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp2.jpg
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp3.jpg

GIMP is a powerful free paint program used by many programmers (including the developers of Dom2). These scripts generate random maps. Changing the settings is easy. Changing the color pattern is possible but it involves playing with the palette. Creating a gradient palette which it does make fairly easy after you play with it abit. I could switch to automatically creating these instead of the DomMap stuff except these dont fill my needs. Im not patient enough to add the rest.

GIMP does have layers capability and edging tools which I think could be used to trace borders around major color areas. Then it would just be dividing the areas that are still too big, and adding the white pixel to each. I offer this option to you people to play with because its heading in the wrong direction for me at the moment.

Wow, that is really impressive. Particularly the first two.

Certainly a lot easier than hand drawing all of that coastline! (I've done it so I know!).

Anyway, yes, I have GIMP and might just try that stuff out

Thanks Gandalf!

Targa · #44 February 2nd, 2004, 02:35 AM

Wow, very interesting fractal on this one:
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp2.jpg

I love the way it came out looking like a topo map. With enough experimentation....who knows how good they might be "right out of the box", so-to-speak.

Gandalf Parker · #45 February 2nd, 2004, 04:44 AM

OK I played with that generator abit. Made a new Version of its palette adding some mountain colors on the end. Played with the numbers. Anyway it didnt take long to get this...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp4.jpg

PhilD · #46 February 2nd, 2004, 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
OK I played with that generator abit. Made a new Version of its palette adding some mountain colors on the end. Played with the numbers. Anyway it didnt take long to get this...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp4.jpg

Not bad... I'd change the sea portion of the palette so that it moved quickly to a deep blue, so as to leave mostly light blue/white along the shores, then move to a deeper blue that would be mostly uniform in the seas.

diamondspider · #47 February 2nd, 2004, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
OK I played with that generator abit. Made a new Version of its palette adding some mountain colors on the end. Played with the numbers. Anyway it didnt take long to get this...
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ects/gimp4.jpg

That is a pretty nice base. In my own mind, it completes about 15% of the work though.

Very nice start, but the inner terrain is always time consuming if you want a "professional" look.

STILL, the coastline is always a real boring pain to do and isn't nearly as fun as the terrain, so it is a GREAT thing to automate

Whatever Targa did to get him map looking like that will probably be needed in any case. I like his idea of having a tutorial on how he did it.

Maybe he has ideas on how to tweak the automated process to cut out a step or two?

[ February 02, 2004, 14:45: Message edited by: diamondspider ]

Targa · #48 February 2nd, 2004, 05:40 PM

Quote:

Maybe he has ideas on how to tweak the automated process to cut out a step or two

Not really.

The only thing that I can think of that would be of any use to the Dom community as of this moment would be for someone to figure out how to compile Phil's DomMap2 to run in an MS Windows environment.

Quote:

Whatever Targa did to get him map looking like that will probably be needed in any case. I like his idea of having a tutorial on how he did it.

Well, that's kinda like comparing apples and oranges. Unless someone were to code a very complex and powerful program, you'll never get maps that look like Aran from an automatic map generator. So as for "whatever I did to get my map looking like that", it's alot of tedious work by hand, and only "needed" if you want the map to look similar to the maps that came with the game. Phil and Gandalf's priorities are geared more toward Dommap and auto-generation, which doesn't lend itself to the "hand-drawn" look. Gandalf has mentioned (IIRC) that he's been generating random maps in the hopes that people will use them as a base for their own customization/artwork.

Gandalf and I have discussed the possibility of me supplying him with some command-line switches for DomMap2, and he running off a batch of random maps, but we need to coordinate "machine time", since he has other things going on. I sorta left that conversation in limbo...I guess I could get back to it.

As for a tutorial, I'm not sure how many Photoshop Users there are here, and if there are, how many would be willing to go through the time-consuming process of mapmaking. If there's enough of a demand for it, I'll write one.

Gandalf Parker · #49 February 2nd, 2004, 08:35 PM

OK its not an auto-run yet but check out the 02Feb files here
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ndomMaps/junk/

I have the script making those referr to them as "blanks". There is actually a .tga and a .map file for each with all the #terrain and #neighbor commands. There are still some randoms being done such as how many provinces and how much water but those could be locked down to absolute numbers if you wanted. Is this what you guys had in mind?

[ February 02, 2004, 18:36: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Targa · #50 February 2nd, 2004, 09:21 PM

Alot of those look really good as templates! It looks like you may need to tweak the 'shore cost', as a few of them have land province borders bleeding into the sea. Also (using the first pic as an example), I'd experiment with ruggedness between 1.4 - 1.7 or so...enough to eliminate the hundreds of tiny islands, as it would be very difficult to work with otherwise. But yeah....those are looking really good!

That's basically what I've been doing with DomMap. Running off a bunch of pics similar to those until I see a shape I like. Of course, yours are so much better to work with, since they can be way larger than 800x599, and have the corresponding .map files that work with Dom2. I haven't been playing with province numbers, since I've been doing the borders by hand. I've found that no matter what setting I used, DomMap would always end up giving me some province shapes I disliked. Although now that I think about it, since the capitals are what counts, the borders can be made "flexible".

Once I get a map I like the looks of, I copy the seed from the map file, paste it into a batch file, and adjust the other parameters to tweak it.
Here's my "base" switches:
-d 0 -pl 15 -nl 260 -tc 900 -sa 2 -ns 25 -ss 55 -wl 30 -ls 25 -r 1.7

Those get varied a bunch when I get a shape I like though.

The only thing that I see that would need to be modified (other than sprucing up the map with graphics) is that the map file generated by DomMap2 also has terrain info, doesn't it? For example, the pics at the bottom of that page, with the different colors on the land, are showing plains, mountains, etc... If you start with a "basic blank" (all brown) like the top ones, you'd have to add terrain info thru Dom2 map editor (not that that's a big deal).

[ February 02, 2004, 19:26: Message edited by: Targa ]