[MapScript] Erebus Continent

[[to_xp]Gekko]

nice to see tiny islands back, they never annoyed me

that code that prevents players to be separated by peaks or water sounds awesome btw. you can't fully appreciate how important that is until you've played a few games with Erebus and got civs stranded in a place they can't leave

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

well, you said I can try and convince you about the goodness that a "connect islands to mainland" routine would bring, so here it comes

Disclaimer: I urge you to build a Gekko voodoo doll and feel free to strangle it at any point during the reading of this post

long story short, you can make it an option and let the user choose. I strongly suspect that most people will enable it, as these days everyone and their dog is well aware of the fact that FFH naval AI is lacking. I know you dislike having many options, but you can just bundle it with sealevel or cohesion like you did with starting units and flavour

 

[Seven05]

I'll tell you what, I add it in place of y-wrap.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

you sure you wanna risk enraging the Lurker Who Loves Toroids?

 

[Tholal]

Basically, before shrinking the heightmap down to the final map size I search for small islands and sink them down below sealevel, I also sink them an extra little random amount and then recalculate the sea level.

What's your cutoff size for small islands?


On a related note, I autoplayed a little over 400 turns on a Low Cohesion, High Water map last night with my Naval AI and there was all sorts of fun! The Lanun were especially aggressive, wiping out both the Calabim and the Hippus with sea assaults, though they weren't the only ones to venture across the oceans! I'm hoping to be able to run it up through turn 500 tonight and post mini-map screenshots.

 

[Seven05]

What's your cutoff size for small islands?


On a related note, I autoplayed a little over 400 turns on a Low Cohesion, High Water map last night with my Naval AI and there was all sorts of fun! The Lanun were especially aggressive, wiping out both the Calabim and the Hippus with sea assaults, though they weren't the only ones to venture across the oceans! I'm hoping to be able to run it up through turn 500 tonight and post mini-map screenshots.

Well that's good to hear

Now if I can get enough time to play more than 50 turns or so I'll have to try out your module. Have you tried plugging it in to anything other than base FfH? I'd hate to give up all of the goodies in RiFE and Wild Mana.

The exact cutoff size is kind of complicated, well for the current version it does two passes and the second pass is very easy, you can see the exact python cose on the previous page. The size there is determined by map size and cohesion. So on a standard map the minimum island sizes are 3,2,1 for high, medium and low cohesion.

For the next version there is no cleanup on the final map. The map is generated using an oversized heightmap first, this heightmap is always the same size regardless of what size map you want to play on. On this oversized map I use 5,3,2 for the minimum island size by cohesion, but I don't just 'erase' them, I push the height of those marked tiles down below the current sealevel and then I recalculate the sealevel. Since islands are normally close to larger landmasses this has the same effect as pushing them into the larger landmass except it's done in a more natural looking way. The final effect once the map has been shrunk to the final size depends on the final size you selected, but in general you get 'thicker' continents without losing the interesting island chains.

This works better than cleaning up islands forcibly since it works before the final sealevel is determined as that means you'll get the amount of land expected for the sealevel without losing any. In 2.58 on a large map with high cohesion it can erase as many as 300 land tiles from what I saw in my tests (typically it would erase about 50-100 land tiles).

 

[Milaga]

Hmm... I'll have to check his terrain types, may be the marsh/wetland like you mentioned. Do other FfH scripts like Erebus.py or MountainCoast.py work with Orbis?

I haven't tried MountainCoast. It comes with Erebus and Creation installed, and Erebus definitely works. Creation is like Erebus except even more intensely claustrophobic.

 

[Seven05]

Hah... well 'Creation' is just an older version of 'Erebus'

 

[Tholal]

Test run with this mapscript posted in the More Naval AI mod thread.

 

[Seven05]

Nice results there, from your changes not my map... well, the map looked good to

 

[Seven05]

2.59 is up.

The biggest changes are things you won't notice since they just deal with handling info types in a cleaner way to catch mods that don't support specific terrains or features.

Island cleanup is handled differently now. There is no longer a pass to forcibly remove small islands. Instead, during the heightmap generation small islands are pushed down below the sealevel and then the sealevel is recalculated. The strenght of this effect is based on cohesion and increased when using the 'minimal flavor' option for stating positions. The biggest effect of this is that high cohesion maps are far less likely to have multiple continents.

Flavor preferences for hills, forests and jungles are handled slightly differently now as well. The end result is better weighing of bonuses and total workable tiles for civs with a preference for hills, forests and/or jungles.

I fixed two 'index out of bounds' errors that could occur.

I think that's it

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

sounds great, thanx

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

doesn't work for me, throws python exceptions at game startup, game refuses to load

 

[Seven05]

oops... one second, that check for e, g, k and o is still in there

 

[Seven05]

Ok, all better now, if you're one of the two people who downloaded it before this post, download it again

 

[Seven05]

Bah, typos...

I'll have to upload another fix, I'll just make it 2.60, expect it in maybe 10 minutes or so.

 

[Seven05]

Ok, 2.60 is up. It fixes all my rediculous typos

You also get to see the newest feature since I was working on that too. There's a new option under the plains settings for 'Northern Plains'

To see it best, create a large, high cohesion, low sealevel map with increased deserts (everything else at default), northern plains and leave the smart climate off. Those of you familiar with the normally insane amount of deserts that woudl create will see the difference right away.

Edit: And yes, I tested it a few extra times to make sure I caught all of the typos this time around

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

thanx very much

care to explain better what northern plains does?

 

[Valkrionn]

Ok, 2.60 is up. It fixes all my ridiculous typos

You also get to see the newest feature since I was working on that too. There's a new option under the plains settings for 'Northern Plains'

To see it best, create a large, high cohesion, low sealevel map with increased deserts (everything else at default), northern plains and leave the smart climate off. Those of you familiar with the normally insane amount of deserts that would create will see the difference right away.

Edit: And yes, I tested it a few extra times to make sure I caught all of the typos this time around

Fixed.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

edit: nevermind