Map Generator- Please Critique!

[MonsOlympus]

@;22364

Thanks!

Actually, my first iteration of the biome placement was random, and it was fairly decent, but I chose a more tailored setup so I could test map control as I iterate.

Realize though, that in a Civilization type game, you will have many map types to choose from. The version you see is a map with 2 generally equal continents. To do a Pangea, I could switch out the Biome Generator and do a Pangea setup. I can have a hundred generator types, and the user chooses from them. I could even make a randomized earth map replica just by fine tuning the biome generator.

It is actually very adaptable. In order to grow the poles out, all I have to do is reduce the number of water seeds that generate between the pole and the continent. It is as simple as that. For instance, I could reduce water in the north tundra while leaving it the same in the south. This would create something more akin to the Earth, which has open ocean in the south, and vast tundra in the north.

Im still having alot of trouble knowing what youre doing here because each piece is being sliced up and its hard to see the flow of execution which was my main reason for wanting to see, to help minimize the number of iterations because they will largely determine how long it takes to generate a map.

I guess I just look at things alittle differently in that I start with this vision of water everywhere, then I have visions of deep water cracking and pushing the shallow sands up through the water to form continents then on the islands and continents formed you get mountains and peaks, hills and rivers.

@;22364

Generating the blank tiles has been on my mind for a bit now. I would then go behind and instead of placing tiles, it would be instancing materials.

My array already keeps the vector information, and I was planning on having other arrays in the future to place actors into another array so I can reference what tile type is in each location.

Can you show an example of how you would use an enumerator in this case? When I looked into enumerators prior to arrays they didn’t really do what I needed them to but I may not have fully understood how to use them.

I guess what Im trying to say is that a 2D Array is a 2D vector already so you dont need to generated that information, its one of the best bits to make entirely procedural. I know from your table that any index ending in 4 or 5 will be tropical and I can put that into a relatively simple formula for any height so you dont really need to store that data you are much better off storing the formula and being able to delegate that formula out.

Basically an enumator like for, we’ll call it temperature but you might have a better name:

enum EClimate
{
	EC_Arctic, //1
	EC_Tundra, //2
	EC_Temperate, //3
	EC_SubTropical, //4
	EC_Tropical; //5
};

This would be stored in the tile itself and you can store its position in the array in the tile itself also, that tile can also know based on on the fixed 2D array what tiles are directly adjacent to it which can also be stored for quicker lookup and you can do this for every tile when creating the vector field.

From previously you dont need to search all tiles to know which are Tropical for instance you simply do height-5 or height-6 which is the midpoint of the height so having the enumerator could be purely for the visuals and the biome generation portion.

@;22364

Do you have a link to any code examples of this kind of generation?

Im not sure if there are any examples considering I came up with it on my own just looking at what you had and using my experience to think about where I would do things differently or make improvements. Im not sure exactly how close you are sticking to the Civ 5 methodologies but Im sure they are well documented so if there are references you are using I could look over to provide more detailed feedback on how my thinking differs that would be appreciated.

@;22364

My general idea for coast generation and other similar tasks was to do a neighbor check to determine which mesh/material and what rotation it should use for proper placement. In the current setup my tiles are not referencable and it is something I will have to address sooner or later. By placing tiles first, and then changing them later this also allows me to do such checks and mesh swaps after every other tile type has been decided. Once the generator knows water will be placed in a certain hex, and land around it, then it can say use WaterMesh17 or whatever with Rotation Z in order to align the coasts.

Yup this is where the idea of generating land masses from the center outwards has its benefits, you can have an array of outmost tiles only and iterate coastlines extremely rapidly. You could also generate ocean depth in much the same manner but it does depend if youre just wanting to go the Civ route with acouple of depths where the most deep can simply be X units from the beaches roughly.

@;22364

Rivers are another thing on my mind. It seems like splines are the normal method of river type placement in games like these, but from what I understand splines are somewhat under-developed in the current engine, for things other than landscapes. I am not in a rush to implement rivers, but I see a good method for generating and referencing them I will certainly see if I can use it.

Probably the most complex part of the generation and splines will certainly be beneficial but there is still alot of data to consider when generating them. Civ cheats in regards to mountains and mountain ranges in some regards and typically does rives on more hills or flats with flood plains, so matching that wouldnt be overly difficult but if youre looking to do better and have water that actually has some semblance to real rivers and lakes it’ll be alot more difficult and the height of the surrounds will play an extremely important role.

@;22364

This was just how I got it to work in the first place and I have spent more time on fleshing out the random generation than I have into looking at upgrading the actual placement process.

If you have a good method I can use to reference the field of blank tiles, I am all ears.

Main reason I wanted to give some critiques is to perhaps save you some time, it can be easy to get hung up on extra details in the implementation rather than improving on the core implementation itself. As I said I still dont understand entirely how what you have works but I think youre using sub-arrays for each biome to create smaller fast iteration lists, this is a good way to use memory for this kind of thing especially if you only need to do the generation once off and save the end result clearing all the memory when youre done.