Map Generator 2.0

[nom]

But do you have any ideas why imported maps would crash on export, though everything else was done speedily and well?

Yes, I think the scaled up size is not set properly when importing the maps. If you import a map the same size as the default maps exporting works.

So, if you first set the width and height to 5616*3585 and generate a random map, then I hope the correct size of the map is set. Then you import your 1872*1195 map. I think that could work but I'll try to have a new beta ready for tomorrow night or saturday.

[Keanon]

Oh I have to set the width and height? >_< Damnit, you didn't have to in earlier versions. I'll give it a few more spins.

[iontom]

At the moment I actually prefer not to have it. It gives me an excuse to force others to do the testing. I don't have time to do more than try to work on the code.

Let me know when you change your mind

I found the mini-map mod:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...um-version-3.0

I'll look into that more tonight, maybe that feature can be added too ontop of just figuring out how to place a randomized minimap. I also like that font that mod uses on the provinces, I'll play with the design some more, I seem to be enjoying myself most with that. Perhaps the creator phishtaco would be worth asking for advise/help on continent & province algorithms. He's a game creator and a phD level mathematician. Maybe introducing some sort of noisy polar trig functions to your Voronoi plots... Who knows... He might.

http://venuspatrol.nfshost.com/
http://www.math.cas.cz/~thapen/

[nom]

Oh I have to set the width and height? >_< Damnit, you didn't have to in earlier versions. I'll give it a few more spins.

If it works the way it should you wouldn't have to set it, but at the moment its bugged.

[nom]

Let me know when you change your mind

I found the mini-map mod:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...um-version-3.0

I'll look into that more tonight, maybe that feature can be added too ontop of just figuring out how to place a randomized minimap. I also like that font that mod uses on the provinces, I'll play with the design some more, I seem to be enjoying myself most with that. Perhaps the creator phishtaco would be worth asking for advise/help on continent & province algorithms. He's a game creator and a phD level mathematician. Maybe introducing some sort of noisy polar trig functions to your Voronoi plots... Who knows... He might.

http://venuspatrol.nfshost.com/
http://www.math.cas.cz/~thapen/

I haven't seen phishtaco here for ages. On the other hand I haven't really been active myself lately. For the moment you'll just have to settle with a phd level physicist. It would feel too much like cheating if I asked for someone elses help with the algorithms.

[iontom]

I haven't seen phishtaco here for ages. On the other hand I haven't really been active myself lately. For the moment you'll just have to settle with a phd level physicist. It would feel too much like cheating if I asked for someone elses help with the algorithms.

Haha, wow! That's awesome! Didn't mean any offense, I didn't know! Much respect to you! I'm just have a lowely astronomy bachelors myself, but I would guess at least 80% of Paradox gamers have a degree in something technical though. I've tried explaining the game to political science/liberal arts majors and they acted like I was crazy. They just put up a blank stare or try to argue that people and politics can never be accurately simulated. I always beg to differ; if a few billion nitrogen molecules can be described by the ideal gas law, the actions of individual can be approximated into politics, especially if you're just approximating the territorial claims of monarchies.

And the need to solve the problem yourself.. I understand that, maybe you should write a paper on this! I've seen less academic journal articles before And there's always SIGGRAPH

[nom]

Oh I have to set the width and height? >_< Damnit, you didn't have to in earlier versions. I'll give it a few more spins.

I just realized there's another quick fix. The save files are plain text. Just open the rmg file with notepad and set the width and height manually. It's item 9-12 in the list but should be easy to spot.

[nom]

Haha, wow! That's awesome! Didn't mean any offense, I didn't know! Much respect to you! I'm just have a lowely astronomy bachelors myself, but I would guess at least 80% of Paradox gamers have a degree in something technical though. I've tried explaining the game to political science/liberal arts majors and they acted like I was crazy. They just put up a blank stare or try to argue that people and politics can never be accurately simulated. I always beg to differ; if a few billion nitrogen molecules can be described by the ideal gas law, the actions of individual can be approximated into politics, especially if you're just approximating the territorial claims of monarchies.

And the need to solve the problem yourself.. I understand that, maybe you should write a paper on this! I've seen less academic journal articles before And there's always SIGGRAPH

Oh god no , I have enough trouble creating anything modestly publishable with what I do on my day job.

[iontom]

Oh god no , I have enough trouble creating anything modestly publishable with what I do on my day job.

"I made a cool video game" isn't really a good start to a paper, but I have seen social physics type papers before. Just run a Monte Carlo simulation and then you can write about anything!
http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v85/i2/e026104

What type of physics do you work on?

Back on topic, I'll look into minimap modding tonight, if I find a way to do it easily I'll give you dimensions and maybe the generator could output an image.

[HelloGoodSir]

I am trying to have it import my map. Under the "build map" button I clicked the "import" button. I imported a light gray/dark gray bitmap. It spent some time making other things (mask, rivers, etc...). Then under "create provinces" I clicked "import". That results in a crash with the "Windows encountered a problem" message. If I instead click "create provinces" and all of the rest everything goes fine and it creates a new mod. However that mod crashes during the "creating rivers" stage.

I did a little checking and it seems that the bitmaps have all been scaled up and have a border on the bottom and right sides. For example rivers.bmp has a green area on the bottom and is 5616x2160 instead of 1239x655, so it seems to have taken that from the height and width rather than from the bitmap. So I though that the size mismatch might be why I could not load my provinces.bmp the first time. Nope, again it crashed.

I have a provinces.bmp, a rivers.bmp, and a heightmap.bmp how should I use these to create a map?

[iontom]

I am trying to have it import my map. Under the "build map" button I clicked the "import" button. I imported a light gray/dark gray bitmap. It spent some time making other things (mask, rivers, etc...). Then under "create provinces" I clicked "import". That results in a crash with the "Windows encountered a problem" message. If I instead click "create provinces" and all of the rest everything goes fine and it creates a new mod. However that mod crashes during the "creating rivers" stage.

I did a little checking and it seems that the bitmaps have all been scaled up and have a border on the bottom and right sides. For example rivers.bmp has a green area on the bottom and is 5616x2160 instead of 1239x655, so it seems to have taken that from the height and width rather than from the bitmap. So I though that the size mismatch might be why I could not load my provinces.bmp the first time. Nope, again it crashed.

I have a provinces.bmp, a rivers.bmp, and a heightmap.bmp how should I use these to create a map?

I've been having problems with any full size maps too. I can generate random maps at 5616x2160, and if I use a smaller bitmap for height 1872x720 I am able to create a 5616x2160 map, but if I use a 5616x2160 bmp image it crashes the program. It also crashed when I tried to import the province map too. Maybe there's some memory allocation issue?

In any case, I was trying to test the continent/province/country placement on an Earth terrain just to see how close to reality the generator could hit. It did great on separating continents, it even separates Europe from Asia really well (Although it gets them all mixed up) It twice put Asia in Africa and Europe in Asia but the others tend to switch around. This isn't neccesarily wrong for use on Random maps, but I'm just curious how it picks.

Province placement seems a bit off but that's just because I think it follows rivers? And the rivers were random here. And is the Voronoi density different for each continent? It doesn't look like it in the land.lua file. It might be worth overloading Europe and Asia. Might it even be worthwhile to make a MiddleEast/Arabia and/or India continent to break things up a bit more within the Asia group?





I also tried to make a custom minimap.dds ... I spent two hours failing at trying to save a .dds file the right way in photoshop. I can't get it to preserve the format from when I open it because as soon as I paste something the format undoes itself. Or maybe I have been saving it right and my once stable game is crashing due to some other part of the interface info I added. I will experiment further. I did find a piece of the minimap mod, but I have no idea how it works, there's just a file called borders_2.0.fx but it still just operates on the same plain Earth map dds anyway. It just obscures it like a mask I think. The only way I think this could be done is if some sort of live mapping is done from a bmp to a dds. Maybe flags do it so maybe something out there exists, but something tells me it will take a while or some luck to figure out.

Bed time

[Supeerme]

The game keeps crashing no matter what I do. I am using beta 5 atm. It goes to loading sound and then breaks.

[nom]

I am trying to have it import my map. Under the "build map" button I clicked the "import" button. I imported a light gray/dark gray bitmap. It spent some time making other things (mask, rivers, etc...). Then under "create provinces" I clicked "import". That results in a crash with the "Windows encountered a problem" message. If I instead click "create provinces" and all of the rest everything goes fine and it creates a new mod. However that mod crashes during the "creating rivers" stage.

I did a little checking and it seems that the bitmaps have all been scaled up and have a border on the bottom and right sides. For example rivers.bmp has a green area on the bottom and is 5616x2160 instead of 1239x655, so it seems to have taken that from the height and width rather than from the bitmap. So I though that the size mismatch might be why I could not load my provinces.bmp the first time. Nope, again it crashed.

I have a provinces.bmp, a rivers.bmp, and a heightmap.bmp how should I use these to create a map?

Import map is basically broken at the moment. I will have a fix up soon.

What you should do when it works is first import the heightmap, then import the provincemap and run the generator to the end. In the exported mod replace the rivers.bmp with your own file. Note that the default setting is that all maps are scaled up by a factor 3 when exported.

Also, be very careful with map sizes not multiples of 8. EU3 doesn't like it.

[nom]

I've been having problems with any full size maps too. I can generate random maps at 5616x2160, and if I use a smaller bitmap for height 1872x720 I am able to create a 5616x2160 map, but if I use a 5616x2160 bmp image it crashes the program. It also crashed when I tried to import the province map too. Maybe there's some memory allocation issue?

In any case, I was trying to test the continent/province/country placement on an Earth terrain just to see how close to reality the generator could hit. It did great on separating continents, it even separates Europe from Asia really well (Although it gets them all mixed up) It twice put Asia in Africa and Europe in Asia but the others tend to switch around. This isn't neccesarily wrong for use on Random maps, but I'm just curious how it picks.

Province placement seems a bit off but that's just because I think it follows rivers? And the rivers were random here. And is the Voronoi density different for each continent? It doesn't look like it in the land.lua file. It might be worth overloading Europe and Asia. Might it even be worthwhile to make a MiddleEast/Arabia and/or India continent to break things up a bit more within the Asia group?

I also tried to make a custom minimap.dds ... I spent two hours failing at trying to save a .dds file the right way in photoshop. I can't get it to preserve the format from when I open it because as soon as I paste something the format undoes itself. Or maybe I have been saving it right and my once stable game is crashing due to some other part of the interface info I added. I will experiment further. I did find a piece of the minimap mod, but I have no idea how it works, there's just a file called borders_2.0.fx but it still just operates on the same plain Earth map dds anyway. It just obscures it like a mask I think. The only way I think this could be done is if some sort of live mapping is done from a bmp to a dds. Maybe flags do it so maybe something out there exists, but something tells me it will take a while or some luck to figure out.

Bed time

1872x720 imported map would export to 5616x2160 since the default setting is to scale up maps by a factor 3. You would need a monster of a computer for the generator to handle a 5616x2160 map internally.

The continent names are allocated based on size of the continents. Asia is the continent with the most provinces, Oceania the smallest one. If you want to change it, change the order in continents.txt.

Province placement does not depend on rivers. If you look at land.lua you can see that there are two voronoi modules. One with frequency freq and one with 2*freq. Exactly where the smaller provinces will end up is random. In your map its in northeast Africa, western US and Alaska. You can take a look at land.bmp and sea.bmp in your saved map folder to see the raw result of the province scripts.

More continents would probably help a bit in separating higher density regions in Asia from lower density. Not sure how the game handles continents.

The correct format for the dds files (at least for maps) is dxt3 with no mipmaps. I bundle nvdxt with the generator. You can use that to convert files. I think the command is:

nvdxt -file image.tga -dxt3 -nomipmap

Not sure how many image formats it can handle. I use tga for the colormaps.

[nom]

The game keeps crashing no matter what I do. I am using beta 5 atm. It goes to loading sound and then breaks.

Are you using default settings in the generator? Have you tried making a smaller map? Does the log files for EU3 say anything?

[HelloGoodSir]

How do I disable the scaling by three? Or actually I guess I wouldn't need to, as I can just put my maps back in. I didn't know about the factor of 8, thanks. Then with the colormap.dds being 1/3 that probably means that the map needs to be divisible by 24

[nom]

How do I disable the scaling by three? Or actually I guess I wouldn't need to, as I can just put my maps back in. I didn't know about the factor of 8, thanks. Then with the colormap.dds being 1/3 that probably means that the map needs to be divisible by 24

I actually don't know how the factor of 8 works with the larger maps of DW. I just recommend it to be on the safe side. It used to be 8 with the smaller maps.

In definitions.csv in 1453 vanilla you can change scalefactor to 1. Then the generator won't scale anything up.

[iontom]

The continent names are allocated based on size of the continents. Asia is the continent with the most provinces, Oceania the smallest one. If you want to change it, change the order in continents.txt.

Maybe I'll try adding an Arabia continent just to see if they can be changed. Do any of the lua scripts handle continent placement? It might be cool to have some proximity rule too (i.e. N and S America near each other, and Europe+Asia)

Province placement does not depend on rivers. If you look at land.lua you can see that there are two voronoi modules. One with frequency freq and one with 2*freq. Exactly where the smaller provinces will end up is random. In your map its in northeast Africa, western US and Alaska. You can take a look at land.bmp and sea.bmp in your saved map folder to see the raw result of the province scripts.

More continents would probably help a bit in separating higher density regions in Asia from lower density. Not sure how the game handles continents.

I'll put more time into looking into the land.lua; do you think it'd be possible to modify the continents' .txt files to have a freq parameter without hurting anything? Or maybe it could count the number of countries per continent and assign a frequency based on that. That way continents could be more module and flexible. Do you know if there any province number limit to the game?

The correct format for the dds files (at least for maps) is dxt3 with no mipmaps. I bundle nvdxt with the generator. You can use that to convert files. I think the command is:

nvdxt -file image.tga -dxt3 -nomipmap

Not sure how many image formats it can handle. I use tga for the colormaps.

That's awesome, so you have a component that can convert images already!? You could just have the mod with interface=replace and all the generator would have to do is override interface/minimap.dds Maybe I could modify the parchment into some sort of box so that the generator could just make a smaller version of the green and blue map.

1872x720 imported map would export to 5616x2160 since the default setting is to scale up maps by a factor 3. You would need a monster of a computer for the generator to handle a 5616x2160 map internally.

Got it. Can that scaling factor be modified in parameters file anywhere or is it hardcoded? I also have the problem where a random 5616x2160 map crashes when I try to start the game. There is an error that pops up with a path name, I need to post that up here.

Thanks again for all the feedback!! You rock!

[Supeerme]

Are you using default settings in the generator? Have you tried making a smaller map? Does the log files for EU3 say anything?

I have first tried to use a 4964x3955 map but it crashed while creating rivers in the generator, Then I tried to use a smaller map but that crashed as well.

[nom]

It's time for the next one. Beta 6.

Changes since the last beta:

Fixed problem with map size and imported maps.
Important: The default setting is for the generator to scale up all maps by a factor 3 when exporting. The exported width and height is the values shown. If you do not want to scale it up open 1453 Vanilla/definitions.csv and change scalefactor to 1.

Added option to import continent maps.

Moved ports a little bit closer to land.

Improved appearance of culture and country maps.

Update: Fixed memory leak in river creation


To do:

Fix real map parts, and update the associated data sets to work with the latest version.

Improve ocean creation.

Improve the minimap

Fix a few minor known bugs.


Jobs for volunteers:

Test the new maps. Find out how to make them stable to play in DW.

Go through the events, missions etc. of DW to find which are compatible with the generator.

Write trade goods events compatible with the generator to allow the use of unknown trade goods.

Update the data sets with real map parts to work with the new maps.

Update the vanilla data set, for example with new countries added in expansions.

Tweak the province creation scripts for better shaped provinces.

Tweak the map scripts for better shaped maps (warning, very hard)


If you are interested in doing any of these tasks, let me know and I'll give you some more detailed instructions.