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Creative Projects / Re: Lunkheads Zero - Work In Progress
« on: January 10, 2014, 10:48:53 am »
When I said "tomorrow", I forgot that I'm lazy and have real job work to do. I'm actually posting from my job right now. Aq "Day Late and a Dollar Short" Izzar, stickin' it to the man!
Essentially yes. I needed a map design system that accommodates both random and static generation. That example doesn't really demonstrate weighting or variance, but the idea is that just by defining more or fewer sets, you can have maps that are completely designed, designed on a pattern but choose pieces from specific sets, have static pieces and randomize everything else, or completely random and everything else you can think of.
It does have one major drawback so far: because you have to design all the tiles by hand, maps will look like they're made of hand drawn tiles. I have ideas for how to get around this, by defining tiles as "randomize this area" so you can still have say a 'hill' block but the actual makeup of that hill will be fuzzy, which will be especially important for resource veins. But ultimately I'm afraid my map system (being made of 11x11 blocks) might not be able to handle, for instance, applying a Perlin noise function over a large area.
There's also the problem that I'll have to draw an assload of maps. I plan to write a separate program to basically spit out map definitions with parameters. I hear you asking, "But Aq, if you're going to automatically generate the maps anyway, why can't that be part of the game itself?" To which I answer, yeah that's a good point, I should probably do something with that.
Very intelligent code stuff - snipped!
I was going to ramble about all the inner mechanics of this system, but it speaks for itself. I feel like being enigmatic. Not fully operational yet, but should tomorrow or so, depending on how much I need to fake working at my real job.
So, does the legibility of that code mean we will be able to simply add tiletypes ourselves? Or design "vaults" like in some Angbands?
Essentially yes. I needed a map design system that accommodates both random and static generation. That example doesn't really demonstrate weighting or variance, but the idea is that just by defining more or fewer sets, you can have maps that are completely designed, designed on a pattern but choose pieces from specific sets, have static pieces and randomize everything else, or completely random and everything else you can think of.
It does have one major drawback so far: because you have to design all the tiles by hand, maps will look like they're made of hand drawn tiles. I have ideas for how to get around this, by defining tiles as "randomize this area" so you can still have say a 'hill' block but the actual makeup of that hill will be fuzzy, which will be especially important for resource veins. But ultimately I'm afraid my map system (being made of 11x11 blocks) might not be able to handle, for instance, applying a Perlin noise function over a large area.
There's also the problem that I'll have to draw an assload of maps. I plan to write a separate program to basically spit out map definitions with parameters. I hear you asking, "But Aq, if you're going to automatically generate the maps anyway, why can't that be part of the game itself?" To which I answer, yeah that's a good point, I should probably do something with that.
