Suggestion for LoMRMEx

[celebaglar]

Hi Igor,

Any chance of adding a feature to LoMRMEx to save the terrain map as a 1:1 bitmap image (1 pixel per location, as displayed in the preview). This would need to be in a lossless format, to allow for hand-tweaking of the map data.

As an extension, you may want to incorporate the ability to reload the tweaked map map into LoMRMEx.

Don't know about anyone else, but I'd find this darned useful. ;D

Expanding the max size beyond 256x256 would be nice too, but not essential.

[Perun]

Any chance of adding a feature to LoMRMEx to save the terrain map as a 1:1 bitmap image (1 pixel per location, as displayed in the preview). This would need to be in a lossless format, to allow for hand-tweaking of the map data.

No problem to add saving the preview as GIF, but as you can see, all locations that are not a terrain are displayed as black. Are you suggesting saving terrain only?

As an extension, you may want to incorporate the ability to reload the tweaked map map into LoMRMEx.

Good idea! Why didn't I think of that?

Expanding the max size beyond 256x256 would be nice too, but not essential.

More than 65536 locations? How much then - will be 512x512 be enough? That's 262144 locations - almost 64 times bigger than original LOM, or M/MU!!!

[Old Shendemiar]

Some editor once had inport/export map height data from bmp, and it was damn useful to edit the picture with graphich tools.

So this would only had the difference that various colors would represent different terrains?

[celebaglar]

Perun said:

No problem to add saving the preview as GIF, but as you can see, all locations that are not a terrain are displayed as black. Are you suggesting saving terrain only?

If that's the best solution, sure.

What you could do is make the black into different shades of dark grey, depending on what sort of extra feature it represents. On the small map it will still look like black, but accessing the pixel data will show the difference.

More than 65536 locations? How much then - will be 512x512 be enough? That's 262144 locations - almost 64 times bigger than original LOM, or M/MU!!!

Like I said, it's not really important anyway, at least not at this stage. Don't waste time on it.

[Perun]

Check the Lair! ;D

[celebaglar]

Dude, you're an absolute hero. ;D ;D ;D

[Perun]

Celebaglar said:

Dude, you're an absolute hero. ;D ;D ;D

I know. ;D ;D

[celebaglar]

Question: is the "forests are a terrain between plains and downs" sydrome a result of the cEvo algorithm, or is it something that crept in from stripping the original cEvo engine down the the basic types?

[Perun]

Celebaglar said:

Question: is the "forests are a terrain between plains and downs" sydrome a result of the cEvo algorithm, or is it something that crept in from stripping the original cEvo engine down the the basic types?

I think it's the second one. I suggest you figure it out from original. I cannot remember anymore after almost a year... All I remember is that in original cevo there was many more terrain types. All I was interested in was the actual algorithm, not the whole thing.

[celebaglar]

Perun said:

I think it's the second one. I suggest you figure it out from original. I cannot remember anymore after almost a year... All I remember is that in original cevo there was many more terrain types. All I was interested in was the actual algorithm, not the whole thing.

Cheers. I know what you mean, and what you already have will aid me considerably in testing anyway. The maps would need a lot of tweaking for real-world play, but they're great for testing code and implementation.

I'll be modifying Bloodmarch to read in the LoMRMEx output, and then see if I can get my head round the Delphi code for c-Evo, assuming I can find where they put the map generation algorithm in the first place.

[Perun]

Well, LoMRMEx is just a intermediate step toward MEScEd. MEScEd allows painting terrain like in gfx tools, plus creating maps from heightmaps, loading and saving maps to/from file and random map generator is similar to LoMRMEx's. Above all, almost everything is editable, so significantly different scenarios from LOM can be created with it.

[Perun]

Be careful when exporting map to bitmap when map sizes exceed 128x128 and cell size is 32x32!!! File sizes and memory consumption increase enourmously! And computation time is also significantly increased.

For example (grid on):

66x63x32 cells = 2178x2079 pixels = 17 MB = 4158 locs (original size!)
128x128x32 cells = 4224x4224 pixels = 68 MB = 16384 locs
160x160x32 cells = 5280x5280 pixels = 106 MB = 25600 locs
256x256x32 cells = 8448x8448 pixels = 272 MB (looong time to save, 512 MB RAM rec.) = 65536 locs
512x512x32 cells = 16896x16896 pixels = >1 GB (loooooooong time to save, 1 GB RAM rec.) = 262144 locs
512x512x16 cells = 8704x8704 pixels = 289 MB (loooong time to save, 512 MB RAM rec.) = 262144 locs

This is the reason why I discarded GIF and JPEG support. It seems that these formats don't support images larger than 4096x4096 pixels. At least in Delphi implementation... Unfortunately, original BMP format also doesn't support larger images, so I had to use excellent GR32 library which doesn't seem to have such limitations. Only drawback is that images had to be 32-bit and that adds 25-50% to file sizes and memory requirements. Cannot be helped for now.

[celebaglar]

Cheers for that info.

I think some minor processing to reduce the colour depth may be in order before I import maps into Bloodmarch. ;D

I will be keeping an eye on MEScED too, though it is not my intention to make Bloodmarch specifically compatible with TME or any other game. If it makes sense, all well and good, but it won't be an overriding factor.

[celebaglar]

A few more suggestions for future consideration:

- The abilty to export preview maps which distinguish between types of "rare" location. At the moment they all show as black. Making them have different shades of "near-black" colours would work fine. You would still be left with the same visual effect, but the individual locations could then be identified through further processing.

- The ability to import preview maps in the same format as those exported, and then add rare-locations. (e.g. for manual editing of terrain)

- The ability to export an HTML map following the M/MU html map template so it works with all browsers.

- PNG support. PNG should support all the features of the BMP format, but the resulting files could be much smaller.

- The ability to load and save parameter sets.