Bay 12 Games Forum

You can try the new utility I made, PerfectWorldDF(see sig). It gives you alot of control over alot of stuff.

it won't let me export the pregenerated middle earth map,it says it is being used by another program.  no other program is using it.  I saved it first then checked all of the check-marks.  wat do?

When you say 'export' you mean the world_gen.txt file correct? If DF has the file open it might not let you write to that file. Also, make sure you actually import the world_gen.txt file first, then select or create a param set, then check the boxes, then export.

EDIT: Yeah, if you try to export before importing, then you'll get a bogus message about the file being in use that really just means that the file could not be saved. In this case it's really because there is no file yet. First you have to import the world_gen.txt file.

Quote from: cephalo on May 27, 2010, 02:35:39 pm

Quote from: Turambar on May 27, 2010, 02:31:29 pm

Here's the heightmap I used, so others can try:



save that, convert to bmp using paint or photoshop

Wow, the Anduin river follows that little channel.

Yeah, but the Rhun and Nurnen seas get filled in.

Ah, keep in mind that on the elevation tab, oceans below a specified size get filled in. Turn that number to zero or a pretty small number to prevent that.

I really can't wait for temperature... especially if I can get flat temp gradients.

There's alot that could be done with that. You could even do some geostrophic climate patterns, an equator even. Altitude based temperature would look very nice also.

I've been dreaming up some new features and I'm hoping to have an update this week. So far I have non-square maps working, and though I coded things originally with that possibilty in mind, I still made alot of inconvenient shortcuts that were only possible with a square map, so there's still some polishing needing to be done so that changing the map aspect doesn't make controls go out of sync etc.

I also changed the coast control buttons to a three state button that can do coast, nothing, or mountain. The mountain border is working out alot better than I had hoped, and has some really cool advantages for regional type maps. Fictionally, it helps explain why people don't just step one tile off the map when there's clearly land there that could be useful for settling. It also helps in corraling the rivers together so they can't just escape off the map edge. That leads to some very nice river networks complete with major rivers and sometimes junctions of major rivers! In my opinion every DF world should at least have the possiblity of a Three-Gorges Dam type project causing some major environmental damage. The mountain borders do all this while looking perfectly natural.

I'm still trying to figure out a nice way to import bitmaps in a way that won't complicate the interface too much. I don't want to have to make a bigger screen because I know that some of you are already using screens that are too small to fit what's there already. For now, I'm going to allow importing greyscale bitmaps as another input field for the elevation map, and there will be an optional square filter to smooth it out so you can paint contours with wide brushes. Then you can mix the field in with the noise etc.

Another thing I would like to do for the noise fields is to grab and move them a bit. Often the noise you get is exactly what you want but not exactly in the right place. Dragging them around to offset their position would be very useful.

Hopefully I can have this all done this week or maybe the next depending on how busy I am with life.

I need some opinions on a particular subject. I am currently working on allowing non square maps, but there are some complications. With square maps, all the maps in the map set use 257x257, and then are shrunk down to the appropriate size on export. The advantage here is that you can make a map, and then change your mind endlessly about what size it will be, and you always have that option.

I'd like to preserve that, but when I decouple the width and height from each other and use separate controls for each, there is no way to preserve the aspect ratio because you have to change the controls one at a time! If you want to switch from 257x257 to 129x129, first you switch the width, giving you 129x257 and then you switch the height, but in between the two you have a situation where you can't preserve the old map in that format.

Is it ok to discard all the maps on a size change?

Feature request: The ability to import greyscale bitmaps for the various fields-- particularly elevation. That way, you could take maps from other sources, make them greyscale, then import it into this. Not only instant fantasy (or real world) map from your source of choice, but it'll generate the rain shadows and such!

I'll see if I can do that. There will be some data loss since greyscale maps usually only use 8 bits of data(0 - 255) and DF elevations are 0 - 400, but that might not be an issue.

It would be awesome. Right now it's REALLY hard to draw with that brush.

Also all the sliders really need a numerical value which you should be able to type in manually. Sometimes you need a very precise value and you can't achieve it with a slider .

For precise control of those numbers, you can tap the arrow keys to adjust the value on those.

I just generated a new huge world for actual playing on, and there are a few goblin civs left intact, but the vast majority are replaced. There is one 'goblin' civ that is fully 100 percent elves! There are quite a few goblin dark fortresses that are controlled by human civs that have a goblin 'administrator' lol.

This world seems to have a mix, which I like, but in general I would say that the kidnap rate is maybe too high. In a thousand years there should on average be no more than half of goblin civ members be non-goblins. Not a hard cap or anything just fewer kidnappings.

It's interesting that once you are kidnapped by goblins, after a probationary period you seem to have all the rights and responsabilities of full goblin citizenship. Pretty funny.