-
This stuff is so good, even George C. Scott would look at this stuff. Well, it needs a little work, so I might not get the job, but at least he wouldn't beat me over the head with a lamp.
Stuff 1
Stuff 2
Stuff 3
Stuff 4
Stuff 5
Stuff 6
-
Dwarf Fortress world maps I assume? Nice. Is that what you've been working on lately?
What's the purple stuff? I'm guessing wetlands. And the big red triangles- are those volcanoes?
-
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Well, I've been working on the C++ification a lot too, and making some progress. I've got various text files now so that weapons, instruments, trap components, toys and whatever can be added with reckless abandon.
-
So Toady, what does this mean about the game? That you can travel to distant lands on the map, and check out what other races are doing? Like check out a "Human Fortress" or "Elvish Fortress" in a neighboring zone? That would seem like a huge undertaking. Almost... epic...
-
I'm guessing that it's randomly generated? And if it is I must say the generator does a great job. [and so did the generator's creator] And a map legend would be nice. Most of the stuff is self-explanatory but there are 3 or more types of forests and it would be nice to know which is which. [not to mention the mysterious square root signs]
-
The maps are randomly generated. It makes four fractal maps: elevation, rainfall, temperature and evil. Then it runs rivers and lakes which carve the elevation map a bit (first it runs 100000 without keeping them to simulate erosion, then it runs 400 and keeps them). After that it checks the map for balance between all the terrain types. Usually 200 or so maps are rejected before it keeps one, but most of the rejections happen before erosion, so the whole process usually takes 15-20 secs (on my computer anyway). It'll be fine if it takes a lot longer, since you might only do this once during your whole dwarves career. Wait... does that imply that the map persists between games?
Legend
Rainfall
Temperature
Evil
I'll leave what your dwarves will end up doing on the map to your imagination, since it isn't programmed yet and I don't want to commit to anything. We had to cut back on the original plan in order to get it released at some point, but anything is fair game. A lot of the remaining core elements that need to be put in the game relate to the world map.
[ November 25, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
-
That is very impressive, I'm glad that everyone will be able to get their own unique map.
-
You can even mail your save folders around between games and have like, a correspondence universe or something.
-
Will in far future there be a map editor?
"What do you mean that having desert
in the south is copyrighted?"
-
We've thought about putting one in. Who knows when. It would be really neat to be able to construct a precise world map, and place all the civilizations and come up with the enemy profiles and so on. Then you can fire it up and see how it turns out, more than once. All of the language files and creature definitions and items and all that are in text files, so you could really change a lot of stuff around. The text files are currently encrypted, but there's no reason to maintain that -- I'd certainly like to keep an option for the encrypted version so that people can download a spoiler-free copy. It might be tempting to increase the size of dwarves, for example.
-
Very very nice, I like it :)
-
Anything significant missing by the way? I guess I could separate out the plain types a bit more, since there are things like steppes and savannas... there aren't really "jungles" right now -- it doesn't use temperature a lot. Some of the high rainfall/high temperature forests could be changed over.
-
I guess the main things you could do with it from here involve temperature-related stuff, as you say, and evil. Rainforests when temperature and rainfall are both over a certain amount, coniferous forests in very low temperature areas could be taigas, maybe there could be mangrove forests in hot, swampy areas. A few different kinds of grassland, as you say- savannahs when the temperature is high and steppes when it's low or something like that.
There's a lot you could do with the evil thing- at the moment, hills and grasslands seem to be missing evil versions. Although I can't think what they would be called...
Another idea is that if evil is at or close to maximum, you might get special terrains that were one level beyond the other evil terrains. For example, Haunted Woods, Hellish Wastelands, Cursed Fens... you could use those names or come up with your own, but anyway, these could have especially powerful and nasty inhabitants, maybe some found nowhere else. And various weird special things could happen there...
The reverse could exist as well, if evil was at or almost at zero- Sacred Forests, Blessed Plains, that sort of thing. All this would be probably be major bloat stuff though...
On the evil note, are swamps only possible when evil is over a certain level? That doesn't quite seem right... maybe it could be that they're called wetlands at EV<66.
-
Yeah, the thing with swamps/wetlands was that I don't have a way to distinguish between what should be deciduous/low-altitude forests and what should be swamps. It seems like something extra determines this, like how surface water runs. Since I didn't have that, I just used evil. I'm open to suggestions on this. I guess I could look up more info on wetlands and swamps.
-
I guess one thing I could try is the slope of the square (based on the adjacent elevations).
Some wetlands tend to form when there is very little elevation change (and thus slower moving water). An additional factor could be proximity to rivers and lakes, although I also want to have rivers and lakes in the forests.
-
I'm afraid I don't know as much about the whole subject as I probably should to talk about it, but maybe elevation could determine it?
You could tweak the elevation required for deciduous forests a bit so they need to be on somewhat higher ground and if it's below that then you get swamps. That should help create the effect of having swamps generally being close to water, as well...
-
Great minds think alike, I guess. I posted that before I saw you'd already posted again and thought of it...
That sounds good, anyway, more realistic than what I came up with.
-
It doesn't quite work though -- the adjacent altitudes are a bit too chaotic, so the swamps would be really disjointed. That's probably realistic, but from the game perspective of calling something "the marsh of whatever" it doesn't work. In the end, maybe instead of trying to get everything to happen in this way, there could be a kind of "geology" field that says how wild the terrain is locally. It would go from 0 to 100 and look like the rest of my fractal maps (perhaps a bit more variance to it though). This would also influence the canyon-riddled wastelands -- some of them might just be flatter wastes, while others would get outlandish pillars and canyons. In this way, places with heavy rainfall that have a very low "geology" could become swampy, while having at least some would allow you to be a forest (since the waters run off nicely into streams and rivers, allowing forest trees rather than specialized wetland trees to grow). Another upside to this would be that there could be extreme geology areas (like your evil=100 evil=0 suggestion) that have very interesting formations.
It's sort of an artificial idea, but I think it might work out well. It can also be used in the plains to determine things like low-lying hills. Comments welcome.
-
Adding another variable was the other option I'd thought of, but I figured it would make it too complicated... the geology idea sounds like it has potential, though. I guess mangrove forests could be created at the geology level between swamps and deciduous forests. And then it could also determine the different types of grassland- probably lots of things that could be done with it.
The extreme geology areas sound like a fun idea. Maybe if geology is very high, there would be a chance of special landmarks being generated that get noted on the map, and if evil is either very high or very low at in the same place, then those landmarks could be magical. Mount Doom would be an example of one of these. All kinds of fun things could happen at one- one of them could be the only place some magical plant grew, or a place where powerful smiths go to forge magic weapons, or a holy(or unholy) site that attracts pilgrims from all over who gain some blessing from it, or the dwelling of something ungodly powerful, etc. Probably the combination of extremely high geology and extremely high or low evil would be very uncommon, which would be appropriate. These should be rare, special locations. Anyway, that would all be more bloat stuff, I'm sure...
-
Adding new fields isn't actually that bad. A few more wouldn't kill it. I've put in the geology field to try it out. I'll post some things whenever I'm more or less satisfied.
-
Here's an attempt with geology fields and some new terrain. The snowy trees jar a bit since there isn't snow elsewhere in that temp range, but whatever.
Map
-
These maps look freaking awesome!! Roughly what sort of scale do you have in mind? Is each square ~1 mile or much bigger? Smaller?
-
uh... uh... I dunno... like, open LOTR and look at the scale on that or something.
-
Looks pretty good. Yeah, the snowy trees look a bit odd, and there's some anomalous green stuff up in the tundra. Temperature might need a bit more tweaking, or maybe make a new terrain type and restrict the snowy tree terrain(taiga?) to especially cold climates.
On the new terrain, right off the bat I'm noticing some new kinds of rivers. My first guess was that the red rivers were lava, but they aren't necessarily close to volcanoes and mix with the brown rivers, and plus there's that one lake that has red on the edges... intriguing. Also what looks like yellow grassland and hills. Maybe savannah and... not sure what the yellow hills would be...
-
Yellow hills are just dry with some yellowish grass. This happens in unevil places I think. The nasty rivers are new. Red is particularly nasty (evil>=95). Blood, scabs, burning lava blood scabs, who knows. Just wanted to try that out. Lakes are the same. The temperatures are fine -- it's just that hills and grasslands don't have temp<25 variants yet. If I made them snowy white or... something (half and half?), it would be good maybe. The taiga is the only one with the right picture.
-
On the red rivers- cool, my idea made it in! Or maybe you'd already had it, dunno. Whatever those red rivers are filled with, I bet there's all kinds of horrible things with tentacles in them. Like the Watcher In The Water. Will the other terrains get evil>=95 variants as well? And will there be evil<=5 variants?
I'd thought swamps were still evil at first glance, and then I realized a lot of that green stuff was actually the new non-evil swamps, not forests... maybe dead forests should be made purple as well to match the swamps, or maybe they could both be made brown. I don't know, it probably doesn't really need changing, but it's slightly confusing to have non-evil swamps and forests both the same color and the evil ones two different colors.
-
Is the evil rating of an area random?
-
Earlier in this thread I posted a map of the evil rating. It is randomly, but occurs in lumps. The location of these lumps will determine the flow of battles and so on on the world map.
I'm not sure about how the evil/good variants will work -- you'd want to have more than one I think. So once it decides to make a subregion of the extreme kind, then it can take the subregion class and do all kinds of new stuff to it, which would in turn determine the picture. This way evil rivers can be not only red, but green, or whatever else, and filled with specific and putrid things. Or they could be blue, but have poisonous or otherwise dangerous water.
I dunno about the swamps. Purple was a color that has been popular since the early Ultimas, and for some reason I was being traditional.
Oh, evil forests don't all have to be the same color... some could be purple, some could be gray. I can use that subregions idea again. Some could just be the regular color, but have strange tree icons, or some could be "stealth" evil forests, and look like neutral ones. The player shouldn't always get a heads up about these things just by looking at the map.
[ November 26, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
-
Here's the latest. I added rainforests (uses capital gamma instead of spades for one of the trees), and I made the low temp pictures more snowy for other region types. I haven't done anything more with alternate pictures for different evil/good places yet.
map
-
Here's a simple possibility for really evil/good regions. In an actual game, you'd probably want to make some of it less obvious, and certain colors might be used for good and evil spots at the same time. In this one, the dead gray places turn red, the haunted magenta places turn bright magenta, and the good green/yellow/whatever places turn cyan.
map
-
The new maps- very nice. It looks a lot better now that there's other snowy terrains.
I really like this idea of all kinds of different color possibilities... I'm picturing red as being a blasted, hellish landscape, and purple as being more like the swamps in Mordor where there were the ghostly dead faces in the water. Cyan, meanwhile, is like Lothlorien or something like that.One problem with cyan for good is that it's the color of tundra and glaciers. Those do look distinctly different from the good landscapes, but it might be a little confusing for some people... still, I'm not sure what other color would work... maybe if you made the tundra and glaciers white?
-
White looked too much like clouds for the glaciers, and mixing the colors looked to strange. Also, cyan just... looks colder. What I've done in this one is change the symbol for the tundra, so at least there's no confusing it with good plains. Just like the low mountains are dark gray but not necessarily evil, I think people can deal with some particular cyan examples that aren't necessarily good. A person is bound to run out of colors and symbols doing ascii. This is probably okay.
map
-
The new tundra looks good. It's less confusing that way, and actually the new symbols look colder somehow.
Is it possible for events in the game to increase or decrease the level of evil on the map? And also, how much space does the dwarf fortress itself take up on the map? In other words, about how many map squares are we seeing in the movies?
-
Yeah, the new symbols look a little like space or something, and space is cold.
Yeah, unlike Armok, where everything is recreated with seeds, the maps here are always fleshed out and stored. The downside is that the maps can't be as large as Armok's, but the upside is that they can be destroyed with impunity (something that would be possible in Armok but take more time to implement). The altitude, evil, rainfall, region type, whatever can be changed to whatever by whatever. The dwarf fortress itself occupies one square on the map, and in fact, so that you can play as many games as you want, you can have multiple fortresses per square (and they don't see each other). Once you start getting your nobles, you'll be able to interact with more and more world map squares, and you'll eventually be able to influence everything there. Then your next fortress can deal with the consequences of all the horrible wars you started.
-
How might one destroy huge swatches of land?
-
Here's some civilizations on top of it:
civs
I dunno. Leave it to the evil people. Or if your cave is big enough, maybe you can have lumber imported from villages around your cave entrance, and it will slowly affect the map.
-
Latest
I've balanced things out a bit more and made fewer large cities. This one has 139 dwarf sites (7 capitals), 26 evil fortresses (3 capitals), 31 elf sites (2 capitals), 2104 human towns (15 capitals) and 462 nomadic kobold bands (not displayed). The evil (goblin) fortresses are all in the mountains -- the other evil places have roaming kobolds for now, with much more to come of course.
The dwarf cities are all placed in evil<33>=66 zones. I think the player games will all be placed in between, in the 33<=evil<66 zones. In this way you have a fair shot of trading (almost certainly with humans, and possibly elves), with some danger of attack from gobs, though not too much.
-
It's looking good. So is all this map stuff one of the core things, or just part of one?
I'm assuming the omega symbols are dwarf fortresses, but I notice they come in different colors. Does that indicate size?
I also notice there's a lot of them in the tundra. Seems like there shouldn't be quite so many- that would be a pretty hard life, and made harder if there was a large population all competing for the same scant resources...
"Much more to come"- Will there be lots of different races? In the movies, I remember there being a screen listing all the different kingdoms the dwarves had contacted. Will the map eventually show borders and things like that?
-
Map stuff is sort of a bit of a lot of the core things -- core things like wars and trade and so on. I've just been playing around with it recently.
Those are the dwarf fortresses, and yeah color is size.
The reason they can survive in the tundra right now is because they can dig inward -- dwarf city sizes are supported by mountain squares, where this isn't true for the others (well, gobs are supported by evil, which can be in the mountains). At the same time, maybe the mountain squares in the cold shouldn't provide as much -- temperatures tend to normalize underground, so there might still be running water and cave critters though... hard to say in these fantasy settings.
There will be more races than the 5 it currently places anyway, although these might end up being the main ones. The borders all follow the natural terrain right now, but after I have wars and so on I might have to indicate where things are.
-
Probably the most definitive trait assigned to dwarves in generic fantasy settings is "hardy", so it makes a bit of sense that they'd be able to eke out a life in the cold if anyone could... but it seems to me that they should still be less likely to build there than in warmer climates, if that's possible.
-
They've since moved out of the glaciers. Evil will still occasionally hang out there. What else goes on there will depend on how much time there is to do it.
-
Elves in Tolk are completely unbothered by the cold. They could settle there if not for possible food issues.
-
For info : I have created a link to your maps and to this thread to an other thread, in an other forum :
http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=552 I appreaciate your maps, and thought that it could be source of inspiration for an other game (Unreal World. A kind of roguelike which takes place in Finland. The aim is simply to survive in the wilderness. No big monsters. The system aims at being rather realistic)
So thanks Toady for showing us what you are doing !
-
I played unreal world a long long time ago, back when the english translation for being hurt was "many little damages", whenever that was (late 90s maybe?) I think I tried it again and there were vga images of people or something. That was a few years ago maybe. It's a neat project, but I never had time to give it a real whirl.
I've since loop-erased my rivers -- I posted that pictures on another thread... if it was the big thread then good look finding it... I guess we'll have enough images soon enough. The alpha thingy release is only like 68 days away now. My life is slipping through my fingers. Like the sands of the hourglass. From Krull.
-
So, now you UnReal World forumites are also spying on me, eh?
-
Paranoid :roll:
-
So, now you UnReal World forumites are also calling me paranoid, eh?
-
quote:
Originally posted by flap:
[QB]For info : I have created a link to your maps and to this thread to an other thread, in an other forum :
http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=552
And I came here from that link. :) I've never really been a fan of dwarves, but after reading through the big thread (not all of it, of course, that would probably take all day...) I have to say this project looks amazing. Good luck, Toady One, I can't wait to play it!
-
Welcome to the mess!
It seems like the only person who can wait is Gezol. There is much wisdom there... the first release is going to be alpha-alpha-alpha... I suppose there's a tradition of slowly-improving multi-release text games. We've talked a bit about what would constitute "version one", and this won't be it. 3 to 5 years, assuming I have food and so on. I'll be able to outline what's going on once we get to August.
-
I added some more biomes as I was winding down on this map stuff. Now the different fortress fauna can be controlled more precisely. I didn't really differentiate between bogs and fens, since I don't have a reliable way to determine soil acidity. This will be one of the first release tragedies to be overcome later. The human capital was on the "sullen crystalline hill of romances". This is another tragedy.
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
w / lil circles
edit: (also, I agree that the elves in the deciduous forest in winter look odd... maybe they'd want to stop the leaf fall... or hang pretty ornaments on the dead branches at least... I might color that cyan, later)
[ June 12, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
edit 2: (also, I drew those circles in myself in a paint utility -- those are currently beyond my poor ASCII art skills)
[ June 12, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
