Re: CF: Re: Progress on random map generator? Incorporating the disease patches?

[Simon Hosie <gumboot@clear.net.nz>]

Simon Hosie:
> Would that use a deterministic random number generator (deterministic across
> platforms, not the standard C one) and seeds that depend on where the map is
> called from?  I think it should.

Mark Wedel:
>  Should it?  What I get from your suggestion is that random house A on server A
> should be the same has random house A on server B (same meaning same layout,
> monsters, ...)  Is there any really good reason while all the worlds should be
> a like?

Actually, I decided that wasn't the way I meant to go after sent that.  I
was thinking more along the lines of using random maps as a form of fractal
compression, like in Frontier and Elite.



>  Actual map layout could be determined either by some hash from the name, or a
> better solution would be the map that links into it contains the seed for that
> map (you need some special form of object to say that the destination is a
> random map - and you probably want to control more than that - is it a random
> house, or random dungeon?  How big, etc.)  But this would also allow a server
> admin to change it perhaps (maybe the map generated is really boring, or it is
> a time for a change.)

Perhaps actual map files should declare themselves as random and then the
rest of the file contains modifiers on the randomness of the map.  Things
like terrain style and corner style, and a list of objects that must find a
place in the map. It may also be an idea to take into account the level of
the user entering the map when it's generated so it's always a challenge -
unfortunate if a lower level character wanders in after, but such is life.



>  It could be interesting to actually destroy such houses (condemned) - after
> some amount of time they get rebuilt into a new form.  But this really starts
> to add a level of complication that probably isn't needed.

What would be cool but which may not be practical to implement would be NPCs
that build the maps as they wander about.  They could either follow simple
scripts, like ants, or they could do it randomly.  The rate of growth and
style could be determined by the number and types of NPCs put in there.  So
that the changes are continuous there may be other NPCs with different
ideas.  There's a risk of people getting walled in, though - they may end up
waiting for something to dig them out.

Would it be easy to modify maps on the fly?  If they only modified the
terrain immediately under themselves then screen updates for anyone watching
them would be automatic when they moved off.

A friend of mine wrote a nethack lookalike as a BBS frontend and the editor
was built into it, we would both be logged in and could walk about editing
the maps as we went (by enabling and disabling edit mode so we could test
it) and we could go and see what the other guy was up to and help out and
make suggestions as we went.

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