Well, random enough to hopefully produce reliably distinct missions, but I can't say that for sure yet.
NWAC is an entertaining game, but I've always thought it would have greatly increased longevity with some mission generation functionality. After looking into the scenario format*, it seems eminently possible to whip one up with reasonable speed. I hope to put a few hours into it this weekend, and in a couple of weeks I might have a prototype to show off. I'll try to keep this thread up-to-date.
The current state of the project is thus: I'm building the infrastructure to generate scenarios, which includes some helper data files to specify for my code what a specific unit is and does, some other helper data files to define a location in which a random battle takes place, and code to take those data files, combine them with some simple user-defined settings about the sort of scenario desired, and spit out an XML scenario. At this point, I'm only planning on doing enough of the data file work for testing; the rest comes later. My estimate for this phase is one or two weeks, supposing I have a reasonable amount of after-work time to dedicate to it (which isn't necessarily a good assumption).
To roadmap this project a bit, once I'm done with that, I should have a very naive mission generator—it will probably build a very samey scenario southwest of Iceland that will hopefully be parsed correctly by the game. That will bring me to the second phase, in which I'll add support for objectives. I suspect that, at this point, I'll have to give the AI some clues about what to do. Right now, I can't really estimate what sort of time that'll take. It would probably be helpful if I could investigate some premade scenarios to see what sort of things they do, but that's getting ahead of myself.
The third and final phase will consist of adding data files to cover more of the map and the full roster of units. This is the easiest part to outsource to the community, so if you're interested in helping, that's when I'll need you.
* You developers reading this are awesome for using XML for scenarios, but it would have helped if you'd put your orthographic projection origin in a comment in the mission editor's files.
Just to check my math: your origin is 0 longitude and the north pole (given as -90 so y/projected latitude counts up), right? I'm using 6371.0072 km for the radius of the Earth, but that yields ortho-projected values off by a kilometer or two when I check my work against the locations the scenario editor generates. That's close enough for government work, but if one of you could let me know what value you used for R, that would be great.
NWAC is an entertaining game, but I've always thought it would have greatly increased longevity with some mission generation functionality. After looking into the scenario format*, it seems eminently possible to whip one up with reasonable speed. I hope to put a few hours into it this weekend, and in a couple of weeks I might have a prototype to show off. I'll try to keep this thread up-to-date.
The current state of the project is thus: I'm building the infrastructure to generate scenarios, which includes some helper data files to specify for my code what a specific unit is and does, some other helper data files to define a location in which a random battle takes place, and code to take those data files, combine them with some simple user-defined settings about the sort of scenario desired, and spit out an XML scenario. At this point, I'm only planning on doing enough of the data file work for testing; the rest comes later. My estimate for this phase is one or two weeks, supposing I have a reasonable amount of after-work time to dedicate to it (which isn't necessarily a good assumption).
To roadmap this project a bit, once I'm done with that, I should have a very naive mission generator—it will probably build a very samey scenario southwest of Iceland that will hopefully be parsed correctly by the game. That will bring me to the second phase, in which I'll add support for objectives. I suspect that, at this point, I'll have to give the AI some clues about what to do. Right now, I can't really estimate what sort of time that'll take. It would probably be helpful if I could investigate some premade scenarios to see what sort of things they do, but that's getting ahead of myself.
The third and final phase will consist of adding data files to cover more of the map and the full roster of units. This is the easiest part to outsource to the community, so if you're interested in helping, that's when I'll need you.
* You developers reading this are awesome for using XML for scenarios, but it would have helped if you'd put your orthographic projection origin in a comment in the mission editor's files.
Just to check my math: your origin is 0 longitude and the north pole (given as -90 so y/projected latitude counts up), right? I'm using 6371.0072 km for the radius of the Earth, but that yields ortho-projected values off by a kilometer or two when I check my work against the locations the scenario editor generates. That's close enough for government work, but if one of you could let me know what value you used for R, that would be great.
