[request] Generic Map Creation - Terrain

[Lord Raszul]

Generic Map Creation

Project:: generic map creation
Status:: 23%
Crew:: Lord Raszul

Features::

• random terrain
  the map's terrain is created via jass-code and is entirely randomized. There are lakes, rivers, mountains and hills for the form of the terrain and there will be made use of as good as all terrain-textures.
• Living Nature
  Instead of simply placing doodads and destructibles to make the map look good, the map considers the distance to water, the local temperature, the height and the fertility of a tile and determites on this, whether a seed can grow or not.
  Using this there is a set of seeds set out at the beginning of the map, hurried through a few circles of growth and spreeding to create a truly realistic look.
• Interactive
  Instead of beeing unable to do any (permanent) change to the terrain, i decided to create a few triggers allowing the player to interactive change his sourounding.
  He may course forest fires, or lawines. When a bunch of units walk along a path on a regular base it will become a dirt track, and if even more used, a good street.

Ok, that much to what i plan. I do plan quite some more but that has to wait until the above is done.

I have already created (working!) functions that do create my terrain. Therefore i already have rivers, lakes, mountains and hills.
But now i want to lay the terrain-textures over my map.
Therefore i could use your help.

I need a table. In this table there shall be every existing texture listed. Each with the following values:

• water
  the amount of water (from 0% to 100%, may be ranges) that might be there to use this tile
• temperature
  in celsius, the temperature (from, to) in which this tile may be placed.
• heigth
  the height in which this tile may be placed (from -100 to +600)
• fertility
  how fertile is the ground (a % value from 0% to 100%, telling how many minerals and stuff are in there)
• walkability
  how fast can one walk on this underground (%)
• used tile
  the tile that shall be planted, if enogh people have walked upon this one

If anyone of you would do this table for me, i would be more than glad.
Of course i will give credits.

That's all for now, i will post more and i wil ltell you about updates.

BUT: you shall not ask me to release any of my code. I will not do so until i think of it as complete (or uncompleteable).
Then i will upload it unprotected, so that everyone may use this map as the base for their RPGs or whatever they please to.

- Raszul

 

[dhk_undead_lord]

Sounds interesting

Hey ya... This sounds very funny and interesting. Please invite me for a test or something. I am interested.

 

[ragingspeedhorn]

Sounds cool, I know several people who have tried to do this but failed due to the random stuff turning out hideus

 

[Lord Raszul]

it is quite a mess to create. but if you split it into several smaller steps, then it quickly becomes easier. Nevertheless it is still not easy.

i myself decided to go from 'rough' to 'fine'
starting with the shape of the landscape, going to it's texture and then continuing with doodads and destructibles.
After that, if i ever reach that far ^^, i'll give the nature some more life. I thought about including triggers for animals, villagers (including farming, item crafting, trading, ...) and maybe even a learning system that is based in doing an ability several times instead of simply spending some points. Learning by doing ^^
(i did that one in a few other maps, but that was testing only. i want to merge all my mapping exp into this giant project ^^)


nevertheless, i do still need that damned table.
I will start with a few textures tomorrow in school (in the hours we can do a little stuff on out laptops - like 'writing from the cupboard' or short 'mapping' *fg*)

If anyone could do that table, i would praise his name ^^ (and his doing of course)
- at least as it is no crap

so i already did enough chit-chat - i'll take a look at the textures now. starting with creating the system to place the textures so i can enhance it once i get or create the table for all textures.

PS: i'll pick a random texture from all that fit the current fields data-setup. therefore several fields having a similar setup do only enhance variety. (even though i would prefer a wider spectrum of sets than a lot of similar ones!)

 

[VampireKB]

i already tried to do something like this ( http://vampirekb.narod.ru/prot_CONTEST_TERRAIN.w3x ) and it wasn't as successful as i wanted to be....
at random terraining we can't know right height of a texture(tile) so even if we will move a region from square A to square B and terraform them,we'll can't make a good random terrain.



Terrain generation are good only for decor generation , creep generation , trigger spells with earthquake abilities. nothing more,nothing less

 

[Mechanical Man]

So do you plan to make random map generator ex. Tiberian sun, heroes 3, ... ?

 

[Lord Raszul]

@VampireVKB
i have just play tested you map and i have to say that it is not even close to the kind of map that i wnted to crate.
I want to create a natural looking map, using randomizing only as the way to come there. While you use randomizing without taking any care of realism at all.
(i saw fire underwater, trees on dead rock, ...)

It is nevertheless somewhat nice looking. But i guess, i am not that shure, that this is only becouse of the random placement of terrain, which i do not yet have.
(and i do not want it to be entirely random - i want it to fit the sourounding)

And to what you said about not beeing able to get the height of a field:
i have found a way, even htough it is not a nice one and i will have to work on it a bit more beforei finaly use it, to get the height.
I already wanted to create array[x][y][#value] in which i store all the info i want about each point and therefore i will add the height into that array.
Ok, the problem of getting the height still exists, but as i said already i found a way to solve that problem.

therefore i stil think that i can manage to use the height of a field (its average height) to calculate it's look and the other stuff i want to.

you can take a look at my way once i publish the map.

 

[VampireKB]

That was an alpha version,that i created for about a month ago for a testing of skills. At least,when i undestood that i don't know how to find a right height of a point, i stopped that project.


i have a lot of ussuall map generators,that create terrain & doodads with the right tile texturing.

 

[Lord Raszul]

i haven't wanted to be offensive. i just told you what i saw.

nevertheless. i think, if you would lower the amount of change (decrease the hill-heigth) and get a hold on the where to place which kinda doodads (e.g. add a 'set terrain to' trigger to any morph you do - placing doodads on the morphed landscape, then setting the random terrain) the map could come out quite nicely.

btw:
i fixed my idea about how to get the height of a field.
I can now get the (average) height of every texture-tile on my entire map. (or at least a value quite close ^^)