Gandalf's Random Circus for Dom2 (was demo)

[Sammual]

Hmmm. It looks like you are not checking to see if the Province is a water province or not. What happens when an Aquatic Commander is put on land (Or the otherway around)?

Sammual

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Sammual:
Hmmm. It looks like you are not checking to see if the Province is a water province or not. What happens when an Aquatic Commander is put on land (Or the otherway around)?
Sammual

It wasnt possible with Dom1. We had alot of conversations about that and the terrain tag that has been added to Dom2 sounds like it might have been sparked by those conversations.

If water units are on land, and land units in water, they drown that first round. The results are just a touch more random then they were with some provinces having no guardians at all. What was worse were my totally random games where I scattered native races. Having a land province that can only create water units or vice versa was rough.

With Dom2 some reasonable assignements can be made. That can be alot of fun but Im not sure if other changes might not have made things harder for the "Random Map Cult" (as we were called in the newsgroup)

[georgevtucker]

Thanks, Gandalf -- tons of fun.

"The province is guarded by about 70 units. The army is made up of militia, archers and vampire lords."

[Gandalf Parker]

I cant wait to see what happens if I pull a map from the old DomMap program into the new MapEditor. Everyday I generate 30 each of large/medium/small maps for the old Dominions game. Glancing at them and downloading to my machine the ones that are kindof interesting it is a morning ritual for me. I have quite a collection built up and I dont know if they will work for Dom2 or not.

http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...humbnails.html
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...humbnails.html
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...humbnails.html

The code for generating these is available as raw source so maybe someone will update it.
http://www.ont.com/~keldon/dommap.html

[Gandalf Parker]

I should really have worked toward one of the things we already listed in one of the threads such as "» Solo scenarios, can someone make them ?", or the GIMP thread I started, but NOOoooo I had to go get distracted by a stupid comment on commander names.

After trying half a dozen different methods like alternating vowel/consonent, building tables based on letter frequency (scrabble sites are a great help), looking at other peoples generators, I finally came up with one that is surprisingly simple.

I make one long string of all the names I like, then randomly grab a piece out of it. Such as...
conan xena kull
makes a string of conanxenakull
which generates names like Anxe, Enak, Aku, Onanx, Xenak, Nanxe
Allright. They arent great names but they are unique and pronouncable. And very simple to do in very little code.

In fact, Im about to test a theory but I THINK that building a string of celtic names might generate fairly Celtic names, Cthulu, Chinese, etc etc. So I could build a string of the names illwinter is already using for each nation and get (I think) national sounding names.

The efficiency is just in case Illwinter might be interested. For what Im doing in my projects speed and efficient short code isnt really a factor. If I generate the maps every night it doesnt really matter how long it takes. I also have other code to come up with decent word combinations to name forests, plains, etc that can be used also now that there are terrain codes in Dom2
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...PlainsName.txt
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...orestNames.txt

Maybe I will update the "Poke in the Eye" generator to include at least some province names and naming all the dropped in commanders uniquely.

Im afraid that having the commanders dropped in sensibly (land units not dropped into water and vice versa) is still a ways off. I havent gotten up the motivation to add terrain preferences to the AllUnits spreadsheet. Maybe someone else will. Id love to see unit ID, terrain, commander or troop, and size of unit be easily accessable in a file.

[Gandalf Parker]

interesting note during test. I wrote a fast script to toss 100 commanders into the province of Vanheim thinking I could get a quick list of vanheim names to test on. But I let the loop number also set the commander ID (geting 100 different commanders instead of the same one). It seems that names are not decided by the nation but by the unit type. I should have known that. I wonder how many different name lists there are? Not a big thing. Names like tombworm and childfeaster for the undead units are already handled by my script for naming provinces. Oh well, off to try again for a list.

I wish the old debug keypress was still in. SOmething so I could see unit #'s within a game instead of using AllUnits. So I can see which units are ACTUALLY being used everywhere. I think thats going to become important for modding also. Such as... which of the many knight units are the independents using, and which ones arent in the game at all anymore.

[ December 05, 2003, 16:25: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]