Continental Empire

[Gemini]

Is there any automated way to create a continental
type Empire map? fairland just doesn't seem to have
the capability to create such a beast. Or even a
couple of large islands with miltiple sancs.

Is there a way to hack fairland to perform such a
task? Maybe a script to run as deity? Maybe 1 BIG
island in the middle that all sancs start on,
surrounded by ocean - but everyone has costal
sectors to start?

Thanks.
Scott

[Gemini]

Markus Armbruster wrote:

> Fairland creates fairly distributed start islands ("continents"), with
> identical resources, and not-so-fairly distributed expansion islands.
> That's what it was designed to do.
>
> Maybe -i can help you achieve what you want.
>
> I've abused fairland to get maps that don't look like fairland on first
> glance. My favourite trick is sector selector elev.
>
> Fairland computes "sector elevation", then uses that to set resources.
> It's not used for anything else. But it's left it the sector file, for
> the deity's hacking pleasure. For instance, turn sea into plains, and
> really deep sea into mountains:
>
> des * ?elev<0 ~
> des * ?elev<-50 ^
>
> Or do special things for the areas around initial player capitals: get
> the coordinates from newcap_script, then use them in @X,Y:D areas.
>
> When I get the map-making bug, I tend to end up with fairly elaborate
> scripts to massage a fairland map.

Excellent tips - especially the elevation one. Speaking of which, I see that elev can
be used as a selector, however, what command displays the elevation of a sector?
I've tried comm, cen, reso, sinfra and peek - and none of them seem to display the
elev of a sector. The only thing I can get to show the elevation is a 'survey elev
<SECTS>' command - but that's a map, and seas sectors seem to just be "blank" and I'm
not sure how specific the numbers are. Better than nothing, I guess.

Scott

[Gemini]

> Using survey is creative :)
>
> Try xdump sect. Not exactly user-friendly, but piping it to a suitable
> awk script should do.
>
> I also like "sect * ?elev<-50" and such.

That's really good stuff. My guess is you could use that in conjunction
with GIS data - like DEM files and such to generate real world terrain
in Empire - if someone wrote a converter.

Anyway, playing with des and a variety of elev and des types post
fairland would likely do the trick. What are the ranges of elev?
-100 - 100? -1000 - 1000?

I ran an interesting generation whereby I created the standard fairland
- execed newscript, then piped xdump through bigstart, then did
something like: des * ?des=.&elev<0&elev>-50 -

I think maybe -50 was not the right number - maybe -30 would be better -
but I have no idea how elevation numers are distributed - min; max; avg,
etc, but the idea was there. 50 sect sanctuaries - but with explorable
land outside of that and very little water - in this case it was a
little too scattered, I think, but could be interesting.

Which begs the question:

How is coas=1 determined? if I run fairland - but then mod the map to
add land, will I have coas=1 sectors where they're not actually coas=1 -
or is coas=1 formulaic?

Scott C. Zielinski
Gemini

P.S. Used awk - never wrote in awk - would be an interesting project to
learn awk. I'd love to create a *nix xdump to mysql parser - would be
helpful in the empire tutorial server I'm thinking about.