Azgaar
commented
6 years ago Hi @Dehroadm,
Thanks for the feedback!
- Generator can only create islands, so it's pretty natural that most of the capitals are coastal settlements. You can see that most capitals are located on river estuaries, because they are considered as the best points. In the future, when I add a biomes system, capitals will be placed mostly based on climate (biom), at least not only on geographical location.
1a. Sometimes landlocked countries are getting generated, try to set countries number to ~50 to see. Countries are generated based on capital's location So fixing issue 1 will also fix it. I'm considering the idea of reducing the bonus points for estuaries and ocean coast, it can make countries distribution more plausible.
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You can edit template and save it to your PC for further use. It the same as creating a new one. You can also send a template to me and if it's good, I will add it to the default templates list. Template editor is pretty flexible, there are quite a lot of things it can but it require a clear understanding on how the generation works. There is a wiki-page, but Template editor-related section is blank... I'm not good in creating manuals, the only good tutorial we have at all ("Quick Start Tutorial") is created by users.
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".map" is an internal file format. You can load it via the Generator only. Actually it's a text file containing a map data, not only pixel data like .png, but also cells data, countries list and so on. It's like a save file in computer games. It can be edited as a text in any text editor, but it's not recommended.
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Sure. You can zoom in to leave only required part on the screen. Then you can just save a .png image and edit in any image editor to hide non-required parts. It's really easy to achieve and I don't thing I should add this possibility into a generator itself.
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All burgs are considered to be cities and towns. Most are so small due to a nature of medieval burgs, that were even smaller than my average town with ~10k people (1500 and 2100 people looks like not an average numbers). You can enlarge a general urban population in Scales editor. As for population variability, I agree it should be enhanced. In the future population will also depend on biome, so they will be one more factor and variability will be higher.
5a. No, it's not possible. But it's an interesting idea, I will consider adding this option.
5b. This option is planned, but far from readiness.
5 (or 6). Good idea, but I'm not sure we have enough users for active discussions. I can create a Reddit community, but afraid it will be stillborn.
Thanks for all the suggestions!
Regards, Azgaar
Dehroadm
ZeEliasF
Michael-Ziluck
johnezell
RevengeX96
Hello! I'm a new "user" of your excellent map generator. I cannot stress how interesting, workable and detailed I find it to be. It was a real surprise to find something like this online at no cost at all. You are awesome.
That said, I'm only semi-literate computer-wise, and I've only just begun to delve into the intricacies of what's possible and what is not. This leads me to a few observations/suggestions which may have found an answer someplace else already. If this is the case, I apologise. Anyhow, here I go: 1) Capitol cities: They seem to be always generated as coastal cities. Whenever a country has a coast, the capitol city will invariably be a coastal settlement. This is kinda funny when said coast is but a very small corner of an otherwise large country. I know capitol cities are easy enough to re-assign, but it would make sense maybe to "randomise" the label of Capitol city so that upon generation it may also be away from the coast. 1.a) I have yet to see a "non edited" map that has, upon creation, a landlocked country. Creating a landlocked country is doable, if one learns the ins and out of your map editor. I'm getting there, but it's not as intuitive as the "click for a new map" button until it also generates a landlocked country. I would, if possible, add the feature to "ensure that x out of y or a certain percentage of the countries that are generated are landlocked" 2) if I understand it correctly, it's possible to "edit" the existing templates but not to add new ones? or am I wrong? I'm not sure how to proceed either way (I'm thinking I'd like to create a template which distributes elevations in order to generate mountain ranges, rather than a central "vulcanic" elevation. Some guidance or instruction would be appreciated. I'm struggling to find it. 3) consulting the maps in .map format offline: .map seems to be the most complete format that allows to zoom in and out without losing definition or tags readability. I am having some serious troubles finding a software that reads the .map files that I create on here though. I tried getting 2 different offline map readers but the file was, for some reason, incompatible. can you suggest a specific offline .map reader that works and is noob-friendly? 4) Fog of war: I would greatly appreciate the possibility to hide large portions of the maps before printing (or from view if I'm showing it to them directly on the screen). I want my players to start small and explore the world organically and I would provide them with larger and larger scale maps as their explorations went on. having a "world map" is great, but having to show it to them, or even the borders of their county/region/country ahead of time lessens the experience. Say my map contains 5 countries spread over 2 different continents.. I would like for them to not know that the continent other than the one they live on even exists until it's time to reveal it's existence in game. Is there a way for me to select a country (or a couple of countries) and have only that appear on-screen/in the map? 5)Generating a new map, most burgs seem to have roughly the same number of inhabitants, somewhere inbetween 1500 and 2100 people. The sole exception being capitol cities who seem to have more of them and also be represented by a larger icon. I would appreciate a bit more variation in those numbers, with cities in the several tens of thousands, and villages of but a few hundred people. Is there a way to randomize that automatically rather than having to intervene on every single burg? 5.a) Is it possible to lock the size of the icon representing a burg in relation to the number of inhabitants rather than having to do both manually? I know I can resize a specific burg's number of in habitants and the size of the icon representing it. it would be a great thing if those two were linked and therefore it was one manual operation instead of two. 5.b) Ideally, if 5.a is possible, it would also be awesome if the icon changed (not only in size but also in shape) according to the number of inhabitants.. so a village with 800 people has a small white marker, a small town with 10k inhabitants has the same marker with a black dot in it, a bigger city has maybe a castle, a capitol has a castle with a flag.. etc etc.. (this is the lazy side of me speaking) 6) finally, is there a place where users of your fine software are sharing their tips, saved templates and maps? a forum perhaps? if such a place exists, please could you provide a link to it? If not, maybe it would be a good idea to create one. I think people would like to share their maps to show what they've created, and having a kind comunity answer basic questions noobs such as myself could have would save you some time and effort. Having a bunch of shared maps could serve as a means to illustrate just what is possible to create with the generator, could be used as a source of inspiration for other map creators or just as a quick starting point for someone looking to run one-off games off of a map they don't want to spend too much time on. It would of course be understood that any map posted there should be free to import in one's computer and to adapt or modify privately, according to one's needs. Open source, as it were.
I realise I've written a lot, so thank you again and keep up the good work.
Ciao, A.