Map Generator- Please Critique!

[Zeustiak]

@MonsOlympus;22909

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 have shown you the complete flow of execution. The only thing missing is the Vector Field Generator which is self contained, and some stuff for my execution counting print string. Also, I have some ClearArrays right before my Biome Generators because I was seeing some odd tile placements even though the arrays were empty.

Vector Field Generator(Self Contained) to Sequence
> Sequence 1 >
Biome Generators(Self Contained)
> Sequence 2 >
Vector Retriever(Executes Biome Locators, Boolean Setter, and Biome Placer for each tile in the map)
Climate Boolean Setter sets climate booleans.
Climate Branch Macros only allow loops through if the tile is to be placed in their Climate Band.
Biome Locators, 1 per tile type.
Biome Placer places a tile at the end of the loop.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

My order of thought is generally: water, landmass, coasts, underwater terrain, mountains, hills, plains, rivers, vegetation, resources.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

I think I need to see an example of this before I full understand how that is supposed to look/work.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

Again, I think I am going to need some kind of example for how this works.

What I think I get:

Tile stores Enum_Tropical; // 5, it’s vector, and the vector of it’s neighbors(perhaps ordered starting at 12 o’clock and moving clockwise).

I would simply add blank tiles to my Vector Field Generator so it can lay down the tiles and apply this information to them.

Then, when I Generate Biome Seeds, and locate them, I can use the information already in the tiles as a reference.

What I am not sure about:

How to store and also retrieve that information in an instanced static mesh? Especially the Enum.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

I use Civ 5 as a general guidepost since I spent a good deal of time modding it and it generally has the minimum of what I want to accomplish, at least in terms of map generation. Civ 5’s map generator has been criticized as too random though, so obviously if I can improve upon the generation that would be a plus.

One idea I have involving my biome generator, is to figure out a way to randomly place tectonic lines throughout the globe, and have water/land seeds generate on either side of the lines. The really complicated stuff will come much later though.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

This would follow along with my idea for tectonics.

Actually, Civ 5 isn’t my favorite Civ game. That would be Call to Power, and CtP had underwater cities, underwater ridge lines, volcanos, etc. I don’t want that much terrain down there, but more than simple Coast/Ocean for sure.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

I definitely want rivers to flow from mountains to the ocean. Also, rivers that like to feed into each other as they travel that distance.

My general idea is to generate the landmass with it’s mountains, hills, and plains, and use those heights to guide the river as it’s starting point is in the mountains and it’s ending point is in the ocean. Then, other rivers do the same thing until they hit another river and they merge. I might have 1-2 major rivers that traverse the continent and then all other rivers feed into it from the mountains.

@MonsOlympus;22909

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.

I definitely appreciate it. The main reason I am doing what I am doing is because I am learning from scratch. So I will generally stick with something I have figured out and try and make it better and better so I retain the knowledge and really understand what I am doing. If I jump around too much I could forget how I have done what I have done, especially on the math side.

Everything is modular enough that I could just switch out one chunk for something better and the rest of the blueprint could stay the same until it’s upgrade comes. For instance, the Vector Field Generator could easily place the blank tiles and fill them with information while still keeping the generator intact. Then I can upgrade the rest to look to the new system.