Mission Specific Software Question

[qoonpooka]

That sounds like something I'd be interested in keeping tabs on as your progress continues. I wish that I had ANY useful coding talents to speak of, I'd offer to help. I wonder if there isn't anything that can take an existing planet map at lower resolution, and then use a given segment of it (of known dimensions) to seed a sort of 'refinement' randomization which would fill in the gaps, meaning the master map wouldn't generate consistent output for any given patch you wanted a closer view of, but as long as you saved whatever render you decided to use, that shouldn't be a big deal. You could open the closer-area image that you saved from a previous rendering. The rest of the planet would literally just be there as scenery. (I.E. no 20GB files to keep track of.)

I'll check out L3DT.

[Gamerprinter]

There's a software link in this forum category that points to a Random RPG City Generator - now this app only creates "line art" cities and towns, rectangles for buildings, gates and wall towers, lines for roads, city walls, blue for rivers, green for parks.

I wonder, if there's a way to use the random map generator code - which is rather intuitive, with user pre-sets and modifiers to tweak the output, (though the result is not what you're looking for,) altered to create 3D sprites instead of blocks and lines.

I'm not saying hack the program, but perhaps contact the developer and see what could be done to "frankenstein" the code so it works within GeoTerrSys.

It might be a rather awesome way to generate customizeable cities within your system - worth a thought, anyway...

[Redrobes]

GeoTerSys is a very heavy app and totally geared up for terrain so theres not much room for anything else left in it. It works by running a terrain simulation with a simple fluid dynamics thing on top to do water & ice etc.

Something that I have been thinking about for a long time is a system where you input the terrain including trees and rock areas etc and run another simulation on top where occasionally people are spawned randomly into it. These people have lots of state but their motivation is to raise their wealth and happyness and they have many options to do it. Fish, cut wood etc. All the activities cost a small amount of wealth. So for example a man near trees can take them and cut them for more wealth giving a surplus of lumber. Another can take lumber and convert into carts and houses so that he transfers wealth to the lumberjack etc. Sort of like Civilization but in auto play mode. You also want monsters of various types with their stats and their goals too otherwise you would not get militia, armies and adventurers.

I wondered how complex and how many rules you would need in order to get the system to generate towns & dungeons and also provide a full stat sheet of all the people and monsters living in it.

ViewingDale is a few years old and is very stable. Theres a few more things id like to add to it but its good to go now. Its the viewer, and editor for these places. GTS is in beta and is designed to provide the major terrain and land for ViewingDale. Maybe the next stage will be to try to autogen the stuff thats on top of the land. Its yet another really big project. Each of these take several years to write. ViewingDale is probably 6 years old now. GTS is not finished and is one and a half and counting. This autociv would be done no earlier than 2011. I have seen some people do a similar thing but not on the scale that I would like to do it at.

[qoonpooka]

Redrobes, while I'm about as useful at coding as a TI-85 is for gaming, I'm happy to help out with any beta testing you'd like. Supporting your efforts in any way I can sounds like my best bet to get what I need.

The answer to your question about the autociv model and how many rules it would need is this: However many you care to add. Human behavior is, at best present estimates, infinitely complex.

I'm capable of adding cities and whatnot on my own, though. Terrain is a proper focus for your software as that's much harder to believably generate with any degree of speed.

[Redrobes]

GTS is not easy to use and is command line driven. Its using make files, some Perl and scripting so its not a neat and easy UI. Its very flexible and none of us at MeDem know exactly what we need from it yet so I think if there is a GUI then that will come later in the day. Maybe it will drive it to select preset scripts that work well. I don't know yet but it is a kinda programmers interface.

ViewingDale is all GUI based and mouse / keyboard driven so its much better for what you need in 2D.

I would use Google maps in their new terrain mode and find some Siberian outback areas and use that for your gaming. This isn't published material here is it ? L3DT will be able to create that kind of stuff too in any case.

Human behavior is complex - maybe infinitely so in detail but its predictable to a certain degree or else nobody on this forum could make any kind of map. What meal a character eats for tea is not relevant to whether he builds a farm close to the river or in the hills. Its complex alright but I don't think infinitely so that the rules could not be captured enough to determine where a computer generated peasant would build his farm. Playing RPGs, the GM makes those kinds of assessment all the time and there are tutorials on this site detailing some of those rules. A GM would naturally balance them - a small village on the side of Orc metropolis isn't going to work. Getting the computer to balance the rules is what I think would be the hard part. For example, say your woodcutter became fabulously rich. Would he still cut wood ? If you don't program robbers & thieves, kidnappers and taxation then it could get that way. For sure, real people are infinitely cunning ! Perhaps it is this aspect that would be too difficult to program. Theres always somebody trying to exploit a loophole. Maybe programming something to search for loopholes is the key to generating that correctly balanced universe. Maybe every NPC should be born a hacker and their chosen profession is merely the result of the exploit search. Crazy !

[Midgardsormr]

Heh. I think you'd have some AI researchers knocking on your door if you managed to accomplish that!

[RobA]

I wonder if there isn't anything that can take an existing planet map at lower resolution, and then use a given segment of it (of known dimensions) to seed a sort of 'refinement' randomization which would fill in the gaps

That is possibly the holy grail of 3d modeling for gamers. Search for thing like "procedural terrain generation"

also look for the paper "Generation of planetary models by means of fractal algorithms" by Ondrej Linda (CTU in Prague, August 2007).

-Rob A>