TerraGen in Spring?

[Andreask]

This is far out, but i love it.

You all know that many maps for Spring are created in TerraGen, especially the "Hills´n´Valley" Type of thing.

So, why not implement some procedural map-generator in Spring, that would spew out maps according to the parameters and create a metal an heigtmap accordingly ? Sounds awesome.

After setting a few paramters and clicking a utton, you could have a new hills´n´valley map for every game you play.

I know there are a lot of details to be discussed and this idea is quite strange, but i like it.

[AF]

hmm, first off this sort fo thign should be in mantis.

Second I dont think its going to be in spring fi implemented for a long while, you'll ahev at leasta year adn a halfs wait if you arent gonna make it yourself, as the devs have soooo much todo atm, nm adding new features...


I'm also thinking such a feature would add a huge waiting time to game loading that would be unjustifiable.

[Cyberwal]

Well, it could use standard tiles so it wouldn't have to be rendered..

Edit: This would also mean the maps stay small, because of course they have to be distributed to every player if you don't use an approach where every player simply generates the same map.

Would be a fun feature, but I agree it's not the most important thing right now

[NOiZE]

one terragen render takes a few hours..

[Weaver]

I can't promise what Zaphod's new map format will include at release, but I know he has worked on height and slope based texture blending.

[Tobi]

That's entirely different from generating an entire map tho. It just makes it a lot more easier to automatically put snow texture on high mountains, rocks on steep slopes and grass on everything else, for example.

Also, if there was a prerendered skybox (which I assume takes the most rendering time when making a map), it wouldn't be an extreme slowdown if randomly generated heightmaps are implemented tho. Just as in Zaphod's new format, you could implement some rules which map a few textures procedurally to the map. Then add some random forest generation, which is easy, and drop some stones or other features and you're ready.

Of course, generating a balanced and good looking map is quite a lot harder than a proof of concept implementation.

[Dragon45]

Already proposed (by myself AND other people), but its basically at the bottom of everyone's priority list; there's plenty of maps out right now for everyone to tool around with.

[SwiftSpear]

I remember one of the first threads I ever read on these forums was exactly this idea... Yearly topic rotation?