Spring RTS Engine

With all the faithful OTA remakes and ultra realistic terrain maps flying around I thought it might be fun to explore the more abstract possibilities of Spring maps - after all you can turn almost any image into a map. Enter the Buddhabrot. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the concept of a Fractal, be a it computer generated image or some repeating feature in nature (a landscape or fern leaves etc), and I'm assuming most have heard of the mandelbrot set. The Buddhabrot is more or less another way of drawing the mandelbrot set. It comes out kinda like a ghostly jellyfish crossed with a sitting buddha and looks very cool.
I don't want to turn this into a maths lesson so if you have no idea what I'm talking about just stick "mandelbrot" or "buddhabrot" into google, or start here:
http://www.superliminal.com/fractals/bbrot/bbrot.htm
or here:
http://www.brodie-tyrrell.org/bbrot
The maths looks intimidating but should be understandable with highschool or first year uni level maths.

Anyway, the map. The image i used for the map is a Buddhabrot as described by Melinda Green and named by Lori Gardi (I don't know these people, only their websites), Coloured based on the orbit length (... see above links) with blue as the shortest and red the longest and most detailed. The original image took about 2 days to generate on a 1.3 ghz Athlon, was in 1600x1200 drawn using an exponention function to scale the brightness and looks detailed enough on a 6000x6000 spring map. The height map was created by just converting to greyscale and fiddling with the brightness/contrast. The only changes I've made are to the shape and slope of the shore, for gameplay's sake or course. The metal map is just the height map, so i'm hoping people will fight over high ground for more than just bertha rights. Let me know if the metal extraction rate is too high.

The map can be found in the usual place:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?page=showitem&ID=758

EDIT: Sorry about all the in-line images i had, I know urls are much more sensible...

http://www.brodie-tyrrell.org/john/bbrot1.jpg
http://www.brodie-tyrrell.org/john/bbrot3.jpg
http://www.brodie-tyrrell.org/john/bbrot5.jpg
http://www.brodie-tyrrell.org/john/bbrot2.jpg

Jesus, I just went through all the fractal pages, damn cool. I've always been fashinated by them and now they look even better!

Have to get your attention...

http://www.fractalus.com/kerry/gallery13/warmglow.html

And you made a map out of something like this?

Thats right

Though it looks more like the images in brodie-tyrrell.org/bbrot, though those are zoomed in a little.

To make it playable it ignores a lot of the sharper changes in brightness (heightmap). There's a few sharp peaks near the top and bottom/sides but the rest is kinda rolling psychedelic hills.

I should be able to get the screenshots on brodie-tyrrell.org in the next few days.

Upload it on FileUniverse [ here ] !!

Yes, the image upload thing has been fixed.

Images now on fileuniverse page.

Hmmm, when I first saw that, I thought it was intended to be a water map, with a coral reef sort of thing sticking out from it, creating areas above land and little pools of shallows that units can battle accross...

Perhaps that would work better?

(I'd like to see some other fractals turned into maps... there are some great ones)

So the metal map is the same bmp as the heightmap? I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Just use a plain monochrome metal map if you don't want to do one.

Hmmm, when I first saw that, I thought it was intended to be a water map, with a coral reef sort of thing sticking out from it, creating areas above land and little pools of shallows that units can battle accross...

Hmmm I actually wanted a land/hill battle with radar shadows and troop movement speeds a big factor, but that sound pretty cool too.
I might remake in 8192x8192, and have the top 1/3 poking out with plenty of room for ships. Might do it without the lowpass filter if land units aren't gonna play a role too.

Thanks, think I'll do it in the next few days, although I'm working on a nice red sunset desert ridge thingy at the moment.

...And yes i MIGHT even have to to a proper metal map

i forsee soon someone made landcape generator directly for use within TAS ...

Interesting... Would it be possible to write a random-map generator that's based off of fractals?

Nope, fractals arn't random.

Its called Perlin noise.
I only found out about it last night when my brother wrote me a perlin noise generator to turn the bland Terragen texture into realistic terrain. (its good to have a C++ programmer in the house).
I honestly do not understand the maths behind Perlin noise but google will find any number of pages relating to it. Its actually quite common - the Photoshop Render: Clouds function uses Perlin noise, Terragen Uses it to extensively, and i BELIEVE its used to simulate clouds and turbulence, though don't quote me on that.
Terrain is of course fractal in nature - Giant glacial ridges look the same as tiny errosion rivulets, if you get the scale right. For instance:

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/PerlinExample1.jpg

Was overlayed on a terragen image to add a little detail, you can see the features are repeated in smaller detail and give a very nice ground:

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/PerlinExample4.jpg

Obviously i didnt add this to my height map as the full image looks something like this:

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/PerlinExample2.jpg

The possibilities are endless, with a bit of funky stuffing about he produced me this which i'll probably fade in and tint copper or silver for metal patches/fields:

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/PerlinExample3.jpg

stfu terragen...

How are you texturing it?

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:

How are you texturing it?

I assume you're refering to the 2nd map, not bbrot.... do you want a new thread if this is the case?

Anyway, used terragen to do the basic heightmap and texture, exported to photoshop (not sure if psp is better, its just what i have), smoothed/dumbed down the heightmap and did a few saturation/colour modifications to get the terrain texture to look right with lighting.
The perlin noise i loaded into another layer and used the "overlay" render/mix/layer draw thingumy to add the rocky perlin layer as brighter/darker areas.
Did a similar thing with that slate perlin image - mixed it with a greyscale image of the metal so it appeared only over metal patches, did some brightness/colour fiddling and added it to the main texture with "screen" mix/layer effect (someone give me the correct terminology please!), like so:

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/MetalExample1.jpg

and

http://brodie-tyrrell.org/john/MetalExample2.jpg