Incredibly difficult programmers' challenge - maps

[Russ Mitchell]

I remember long ago in the dark ages playing Warlords II as a beer-n-pretzels game on Friday nights after work. Yes, I am aware that this dates me...

One of my favorite things about that sucker was that although the factions were generally set (and only later customizable), you could always pick up a random map.

So I was flipping through Caliban's Retrofit Mod documentation when I found out that he made a mod with a custom map, just to throw together cultures that wouldn't normally be next door.

And then I remembered how much fun that "random map" feature used to be.
If anybody is a coder and looking for a REAL challenge, you might consider cracking at it. How would the English cope out on the great steppe? How would the Mongols adapt to island city-states? The Turks to Scandinavian mountains?

But I'm guessing you'd need some major coding chops to pull it off...

[Dimitri_Harkov]

Hm. Ramtha released something close to our idea.

He modded it the other way round: The same map, but random starting locations.

Check the download section!

Oh yes, good olde Warlords II...

[BrandonM]

Basically the map generator would create a .tga file. Each pixel represents a tile, so you'd come up with some rules as to what kinds of tiles could be next to one another (Mountain, Water, Land, etc). Then you'd genrate the .tga based on the rules, and add some noise to make it varied in hieight...
It wouldn't look as good or be as polished as the hand crafted maps people have made.

Then find some high points on the map or just some random points and create some rivers.

Then you could create the regions map - i'm not sure of a good way to do that, but i'm sure it's possible.

I think the above steps would be the most difficult part. It would be pretty straight forward to dynamically name & give properties to regions and to dynamically generate a descr_strat file.



BrandonM