Comments on: A Simple to Use Map Format for Cities and Dungeons

By: August

August — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:28:30 +0000

I agree, most people won’t take the time but often those who do find distributing the tile set difficult. This way player Wally doesn’t have to actually take the time to create a tile set all Wally has to do is find an architect (special character- maybe a quest) of the appropriate race and using a simple line and block interface to set up the floor plan and then Wally has to find a work crew. From an AI point of view it provides a team work model to develop.

By: zzorn

zzorn — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:18:27 +0000

Erik: Agreed, snapping to a grid just makes it easier to design the tiles and edit the world. We could always allow the building map to be rotated and positioned any way in the world, just the tiles in it would be aligned in grids.

xrenmilay: Hmm, perhaps if the grid was more of a default guidline than an absolute limitation? But then we’ll need a more complex map editor. Something vector based, where you could for example draw out a city wall, and the edior / client then automatically places / generates wall section to follow the lines.

A full featured 3D editor gives precise control of world creation, but it’s quite complex to use, and restricts the number of people that can do world design. And it makes it very hard to support player designed buildings.

James: An excellent idea.. As long as we can define our own metadata for drawing primitives, that could work. We might want to support point like entities with a direction (e.g. trees, predefined buildings?), as well as line entities (roads, perhaps things like city walls, etc), and areas (different kinds of land types).

I wonder if SVG has some way for users to specify own metadata? Or we could replace some icons with objects, and perhaps specific fill or line patterns with different kinds of areas / linear entities.

August Young: I do think it would be nice to support player designed buildings, but I doubt many players would create their own tilesets / 3D building blocks. If they do, they could more simply contribute them directly through the project.

I’ll investigate the use of an existing vector format for map generation more.

By: August Young

August Young — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:52:08 +0000

While i have been spending most of my time with the AI. Here are some things that went through my mind. you could have a built in editor, with a submition build feature. what i mean is say the evil knight wally wants to build his castle of ultimate bunny tourchure. he has a choice have the building built by Goblins ( a simple design using a spicific tile set) or Dwarves (diferent tiles) , etc and soforth. that way if some one wants to introduce a tile set you assign it a NPC Race crew. that way it takes time to bulld and if the tile set works then all the NPC’s with the skill build can build with that tile set.

What this does is allows the NPC to gain skills and gives the build team the ability to bless or not the tile set. have the tile sets submitted out of game in the lounge

By: James

James — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:37:55 +0000

I think the idea of a simple 2d input format for quick map building is a good one, but I’m not sure ascii is the right tool for the job. As was mentioned above, using character based maps makes everything look grid-like and tiley. Also, you can’t easily specify what direction an entity should be facing unless you define a new character for each orientation. Also,what about multiple overlapping entities?

What I suggest, which is very similar to your idea, is to use dia. You could create a sheet whatever entities you need (I don’t remember exactly how to to do this, but I don’t think it’s that difficult) and then draw your map with them. When you’re done, dia saves your map into an easily parsed xml format, which you can then munge into whatever map format WF uses. I’m planning on doing something similar for a 2d game that I’m (sort of) working on.

By: xrenmilay

xrenmilay — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:34:39 +0000

I have tried using the grid approach and that too is restrictive. I also find the grid approach great for isometric games however place that in a 3d evironment and it becomes blocky. Furthmore not everything will fit in to the 1×1 grid some times you need 1.5×2 object to make it look a bit more organic. With in this paper I wrote about building modular conent. http://dev.worldforge.org/docs/workflow/tuts/curtain_modular.html. I am confident that my approach works for building conent with in a CCS. However I am not sure if it will be usable with in a modular game environment.

By: erik

erik — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:54:00 +0000

Interesting. The idea of the work I’ve done with Carpenter in Ember is to restrict what the user can do, so that the process of building becomes less confusing.
I do think your suggestion tends to be a little bit too restricive though. since it makes the world snap to a grid. Though, when you look at most games or virtual worlds today, you’ll notice that they too to some degree orders the world in a gridlike pattern. it’s hard to avoid it when dealing with digital things.