A new map script (MountainCoast)

[MagisterCultuum]

I generally like the land on these maps, but the water is useless. I wish that more of the seas were interconnected, or that you could set it up to have multiple continents or have it wrap around in one or both directions.

 

[lonkero173]

Yes, I'm quite well aware of the fact that water is pretty useless at the moment, but it was never really intended for anything but the right "feel", as well as some nice terrain for the lanun. However I will do a warping (both warps, it's a pittance to add one if you all ready are doing the other) version once I get myself back to extending the script(busy on actually playing for a change ). Both a pangaea and multi continent version are planned. "Interconnected" lakes will not show up, that would wreck havoc with the script...

 

[Grey Fox]

If you are including north to south wrap, please move the desert to the center of the map so it's not ice->desert.

 

[lonkero173]

Of course . I'll also need to redo much of the river and moisture systems(you wont want all rivers to flow west in a warping map)

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

after a bit of playing around with version 1.0 , I can suggest a couple things that would improve the mapscript imho:

1) there's way too much tundra right now. AT LEAST one fourth of the entire map is crappy tundra terrain, usually more ( I'd say one third ) . I feel that having less tundra would leave more space for civs to spawn in and produce a more balanced and fun map without taking away any of the flavour.
2) flatland areas are TOO flat right now imho. It's common to have big areas of the map without a single lonely hill in sight. it makes the landscape look and feel a bit dull, so a couple hills here and there in flatland-heavy areas wouldn't hurt.

 

[Grey Fox]

I don't like that the plains areas are all plains.

 

[Jean Elcard]

There are still some plains plots with flood plain on them.

 

[PawelS]

I agree with Gekko that there is too much tundra and the flatland areas should have some hills. Also I think there should be an option that creates more islands on the western sea.

 

[Valkrionn]

I agree with Gekko that there is too much tundra and the flatland areas should have some hills. Also I think there should be an option that creates more islands on the western sea.

I haven't ran into the tundra problem, but in my current Malakim game I am completely surrounded by rivers, and floodplains, which is amazing. Only problem, absolutely 0 hills.... no production.

 

[lonkero173]

I just got myself back to working on the script (had enought of a break now, working on a script for several hours a day at best got a bit too close to work...) so I'll just produce a short list of things I'm changing in the immediate future (release within 24h):

More low-level randomness to terrain hight map. This means that lone hills, islands and lakes will be more common.

Fixing the remainining flood plains issue (a little thing I forgot about, random numbers...)

Same for forest types, even thought its just cosmetic...

Improving starting position system to use a more "final" form of the terrain data instead of the slighly intermediate stuff it currently uses. The practical upshot is that players will be less likely to spawn in the tundra areas.

Script specific flavoured starts have been posponed until further notice, Flavour Mod recommended...

Reducing the amount of tundra a little bit, there is still to much of it (haven't seen 33% for a long long time thought)

Warp will be coming In 1.1, now heading on to get 1.0 final (not just rc1) finished.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

sounds good. it will be hard to choose between this and ErebusContinent once you get 1.1 out, but the more good mapscripts the better

 

[lonkero173]

BEHOLD!

Version 1.0.0 is finally out, and hopefully moreless free of bugs. In addition to the things I mentioned in my previous post, i fixed one major bug that caused the script to revert back to the default Civ starting position system whenever there were less than the maximum number of players.... (I said my system doesn't treat the upper left corner in any special way, but civ seems to...)

I've also made quite a number of changes to the infrastructure code so there is a moderate chance of regressions, but this should greatly ease the adding of X/Y warp in the next major version.

The next major version is not likely to come out for some time, but I think I'll get a minor update or two done soon enough...

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

well done! I'll give it a try and report later

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

good job on 1.0 , the tundra/everything else ratio is a lot better now

deserts seem overly rare though, and seem to only spawn in the bottom right corner ( lakes often being there might explain while there's so few desert tiles I guess - deserts got "overwritten" with lakes ) , and plains seem way too abundant. most of the map is 100% plains with no grassland in sight, which looks a bit dull. having some grasslands in plains areas ( much the same as you've done with hills in flatland areas ) would greatly improve the feel of the maps imho

 

[lonkero173]

Good, point, once again. I made the moisture propagation system a bit different, and you seem dislike some of the effects. (more moisture is "dissipated" from bodies of water closer to the equator, resulting in more phenomena such as jungle with lakes, but also increasing the overall moisture level) I'll change this so that moisture level also drops faster closer to the equator.
Edit: It also doesn't scale with map size as well as I thought...

I think I'll also add a bit of randomness to the terrain types, I have them all in one place now so its not much of an issue (would have introduced weird bugs like forest/desert etc... in old versions)

 

[lonkero173]

Added more desert and grassland, changed moisture system a bit. Made desert/floodplains starts a bit more "attractive"

I never realised getting something that is both random and consistent in some way working would be so much of a problem....

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

great job on 1.0.1 ! the grassland/plains "mixing" could still use some refining since it looks a bit like plains with a couple grass dots here and there ( so maybe you could improve it by giving it some sort of semi-random pattern... ) , and I guess the same mechanic could be applied to grasslands ( so that even grasslands areas will have some plains on them ) , but aside from that all the maps I've generated with this last version have been very enjoyable. the only weird thing I noticed was 2 goblin forts right next to each other, but that's just the power of randomness

 

[Bartholomew]

Lonkero, I'm still like two versions back and still loving this map. MY only problem is that I'm picky about my starting placement, and insist on an "epic" location so have to restart a few times before I get just the right random awesomeness. Best start I ever had was the Bannor at the tip of a long mountain spike straight into the sea; placed my first city right at the base of the mountain and felt like Minas Tirith.

 

[mikeemike]

From what I've seen of screenshots, this map looks absolutely perfect for what Im looking for in a mod like fFH. Unfortunately, when I extract the files into my public maps folder, there are two of them (Mountaincoast and OAL Terrain). When I open to do a custom game, both files are there and when I start a game with either, the whole map is flat grasslands with perfectly diagonal rivers except around starting places. Im at a loss as to how to fix this or extract the files properly. Any advice?

 

[Jean Elcard]

Speaking about the splitting of the map script in two files. I would prefer an all in one version too. It's irritating for people to see OALTerrain listed under map scripts without it being a map script at all. Is there a reason for doing it the way you did it or is it only for clarity reasons?

I had to add a non-mapscript-file to the public maps folder back ago when FlavourMod "1" was up-to-date, but there wasn't another way of doing it at this time. I never really liked it, but I needed the functions in there for many map scripts. But this should be different here I suppose.

Since there is no ways of telling civ4 which files to ignore for its map scripts list, you should maybe rethink your splitting decision. Just a suggestion.