Random forest map generator?

TogaMario · Jul 1, 2005

Ok, I think I have a better idea of what you're aiming for. I have a great idea! Why don't I make it spit out two maps, one of the floor, dirt, undergrowth, treetrunks and all, then a canopy cover for it, so you can remove it when the players enter, but they will at least know that it's trees, and not just stumps? Then, a post-production stage where you draw a "freestyle" line on the "floor" and it adds a river at a size you set in program?

(Psi)SeveredHead · Jul 2, 2005

TogaMario said:
Ok, I think I have a better idea of what you're aiming for. I have a great idea! Why don't I make it spit out two maps, one of the floor, dirt, undergrowth, treetrunks and all, then a canopy cover for it, so you can remove it when the players enter, but they will at least know that it's trees, and not just stumps? Then, a post-production stage where you draw a "freestyle" line on the "floor" and it adds a river at a size you set in program?

Oh, that sounds very, very sweet.

BTW, when I've done these sorts of combat grids "by hand" (using Xcl), they made melee combat very unlikely.

Mind you, I didn't get to use a random map last night, but I ran a game where maybe 70% of the combat was melee. People were maneuvering around machinery, shoving people into chairs and even onto a meathook. The ranged characters, naturally, kept maneuvering for cover and so forth but could still be caught by melee characters. (Any time I used only characters who were a lot better at ranged than melee, they got smacked.)

Perhaps more importantly, melee villains went after melee good guys and ranged villains went after ranged bad guys (and vice versa) due to firing into melee and characters giving cover issues.

In The Princess Bride, there's a fight scene where location (eg the edge of a cliff, a tree, and a patch of gravel that could make you trip) played a part, and that's the sort of map I'm looking for - where you can chase people into interesting terrain features.

TogaMario · Jul 3, 2005

Ok, this will be the first draft. This may be the only draft for a while, lol, so tell me how I did, and please enjoy.

http://www.togamario.com/zip/forestgen.zip

(Psi)SeveredHead · Jul 4, 2005

Well, I downloaded it. It calculates the "dirt" percentage properly, but it doesn't give a graphical output. (It says "generating..." and then "done!")

TogaMario · Jul 4, 2005

Oh, forgot, there's a forest.jpg image in the folder that the exe is in. That should be it

(Psi)SeveredHead · Jul 4, 2005

Oh, I see - yeah, it works. This is a great program.

I'll make copies of the forest.jpg and print them

TogaMario · Jul 4, 2005

You can make your own tiles by replacing mine with 72x72 pixel .BMP images. If you don't want the grass to have two tones, you can replace ground2.bmp with ground1.bmp, or your own. If you want to make your own dropping tiles in place of trees, you can put anything in it you want, but don't put straight 0, 0, 0 RBG in there, because it'll make that color transparent. So, if you have a round rock or something, and you don't want the black to show up in the tile, make the "background" color of your bitmap 0, 0, 0 and replace tree1.bmp through tree4.bmp.

(Psi)SeveredHead · Jul 4, 2005

For anyone who is trying this, and having problems with crashing (eg if you make a second map, the program crashes), simply move or delete the old copy of forest.jpg, and the program will generate a new map properly.