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Old June 26th, 2009, 03:43 PM

Omnirizon Omnirizon is offline
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Default Re: OT: Making a Game System (part 4: A Game World)

I'm finding auto generating a world map frustrating.

* I want it do to things like make sensible placements for cities (put them in bays and other areas where cities would actually be built. Teaching the computer to locate bays seemed difficult, I could just barely begin to think how (I was figuring a bay could be located by attempting to draw triangles with vertices on land, legs of some minimum length, and area of the triangle some minimum amount of water). Of course, with possibly 4000x2500 plus pixels, and the computer needs to check within some kernel around the entire convex hull of all water areas, it seemed computationally intense.

* I had also originally wanted some transformation to rearrange height points around to form actual mountain ranges, rather then clusters. I had the idea of using clustering algorithms (like those used in data mining) to locate clusters and then drawing a regression line (another technique in data mining) and moving 'peaks' in the clusters toward this line, forming a range. This, however, left the problem of me needing to look up and implement a clustering algorithm. Educational for sure, but not something I feel like doing right now.

In the end, it was giving me a headache and only serving to disuade me from wanting to work on the stuff, so I dropped these fantasies and will settle with a manually defined world for now.

I'm off to making site building algorithms now though, it is a little easier. I started with generating cities and buildings. A little house first. Random dimensions, random chance to have 'addons' what give the houses different shapes ('L' 'T', etc, so not just a bunch of squares). Randomly generated rooms, with some constraints like 'mainroom' and 'kitchen' parameters that force certain size and placed rooms to exist, then pretty much uniform 'bedrooms' built around those.

I do have a question that someone might be able to help with. It seems reasonable that big houses would have kitchens and mainrooms with multiple bedrooms, but that must be an exception. What is the typical house in, say, London, like circa 1500-1700? Single room? do they have a set 'kitchen' room? Were these houses or was everything sort of like an apartment? What were the range of dimensions for these houses? small and big ones. I just don't know.
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