h3mapgen-cellular-terrain

Part of the Heroes 3 Map Generator. Module builds terrain shape using cellular automata.

Data representation description:

The game map (board) is represented as a 2-d vector of cells. Namely: typedef vector<vector<Cell> > Board;

A single cell can be in one of 4 states: white, black, swhite or sblack:

enum Cell {
        white,  black,
        swhite, sblack
};

How to use the generator?

First of all, you need to include the header: #include "cellular_terrain.hpp".

Then take a look on facade function terrain(...) as well as specialized neighbourhood functions:

void terrain(const Board& board, Board& result, const TerrainParams& parameters, unsigned int iterations);

• board is an input; meant to contain some swhite and sblack cells
• result will hold the resulting terrain map
• parameters structure may be easly obtained from functions such as moore_neighbourhood(...) etc.
• iterations just specifies the number of succesive CA generations

TerrainParams *_neighbourhood(float probability, int self_weight=1, int threshold=0);

• probability is a probability of a black cell on the initial board before running CA
• threshold defines the minimum value for the weighted sum (over the nighbourhood) for a cell to survive or be born; leaving it to 0 will cause the generator function to pick the best value automatically (recommended)
• self_weight specifies the degree of contribution of the current cell's state to the wighted sum

Example usage:

terrain(my_map, terrain_map, moore_neighbourhood(0.5), 2);
terrain(my_map, terrain_map, neumann_neighbourhood(0.4, 3), 4);
terrain(my_map, terrain_map, moore_neighbourhood(0.4, 1, 5), 3);

A quick glance at the code in facade_test.cpp would leave no doubts, I belive.

Which files exactly do you need?

Just four of them:

• board.hpp and board.cpp for general board representation related stuff
• cellular_terrain.hpp and cellular_terrain.cpp for CA mechanics

As a bonus, you may also want to use my ascii -> bmp conversion for resulting maps. Then you'll need draw.cpp in addition.

The report

For the thorough description of the method used, theoretical background, some interesting findings and practical tips, see the project report (the PDF file in the report directory).

Note

Bash scripts producing maps require imagemagick.