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Author Topic: Write your own site finder  (Read 1272 times)

Michael

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Write your own site finder
« on: October 23, 2012, 06:38:48 pm »

I never use the site finder feature on embark.  While the ability to mark all matching regions, rather than deliver the first match. is an improvement over 40d, it doesn't allow me to select the things that matter most.

One such feature - "Presence of sand suitable for glassmaking", would be simple for Toady to add, but most of the other things I'd want to match on are quite complicated.  Such as having an embark that covers specific multiple biomes, or a river that bends (or doesn't bend) in a certain way.

Rather than try and improve the finder, I'd like to see an ability to export all the information you can see in embark selection, into a published file format so that I could write an external program to evaluate every possible embark against my own criteria.
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Cool Guy

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #1 on: October 23, 2012, 08:07:01 pm »

It's a good idea but if it ever gets added it won't be for a long time. Most people wouldn't be able to utilize it so Toady wouldn't even entertain the thought until the game is finished and he is just adding things for the heck of it, which he probably won't even do. I do agree that the site finder isn't as good as I'd like it to be and it probably never will be but I sort of look at finding the perfect place part as part of the game, like any person planning a city would do I have to find a good place or it probably won't work out to well.
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crazysheep

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #2 on: October 23, 2012, 08:13:41 pm »

Actually I think OP's idea may be implementable - it sounds like all he wants is an information dump to his local disk. Some things like "the way a river bends" might not be instantly available, but that might be implementable in some other form (afaik embark region selection shows users how the river bends, but that's only inferrable from the embark region site viewer, not the basic text information).
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Michael

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2012, 09:03:37 pm »

It's a good idea but if it ever gets added it won't be for a long time. Most people wouldn't be able to utilize it so {...}
It's more practical to implement in reasonable time than a site finder that is adequate.  And most people would be able to use it after the early adopters start to publish open source alternative site finders.

Some things like "the way a river bends" might not be instantly available,
The dump would include everything shown in the embark screen, so which tiles are occupied by the brook/river would be included, as well as a complete mapping from tile to biome.  After all, one of the biggest uses of an external site finder would be complex queries like "can I have a 4x4 site with both a joyous wilds forest and some plains, and sourced water?".  It will need to know not just biome presence but the relative locations, so it can slide that 4x4 window around each region to see what fits.

Yes, I'm imagining a large dump file, in the 20 MiB range before compression.
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Cool Guy

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #4 on: October 23, 2012, 10:05:27 pm »

Not what your looking for but I just found out about this and I figured you may just want to see it
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1165
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GreatWyrmGold

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #5 on: October 24, 2012, 06:49:54 am »

Slightly off-topic, but...why isn't sand in the site finder? Or the embark screen?
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #6 on: October 24, 2012, 12:32:36 pm »

Slightly off-topic, but...why isn't sand in the site finder? Or the embark screen?

You can usually in roundabout way by searching for high drainage and some soil. Though to be fair, it's not too reliable in some worldgens but it gives me sand very often.

I don't know otherwise.
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Michael

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Re: Write your own site finder
« Reply #7 on: October 25, 2012, 02:08:37 pm »

Not what your looking for but I just found out about this and I figured you may just want to see it
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1165
That seems to be a 40d-only hack.

I'd encourage anyone revisiting that approach, to dump information to a file (as I am requesting that the official game do) rather than try to implement the perfect filtering engine into the hack itself.
Slightly off-topic, but...why isn't sand in the site finder? Or the embark screen?
Sand was in the embark screen in 40d.  However, access to magma was rare in 40d -- it could be found via the site finder but, excepting magma pipes that reach the surface ("volcanos"), it was invisible to a manual search.  Also, the 40d site finder only ever returned a single result.  So the potential for infinite glass was just as hard to find.
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