World crafting: manual or...

[Andrea B Previtera]

...automatic? The world Ultima VII is huge. Certain details were obviously hand-placed, but I think that the bulk of the "nature" of Britannia has been assembled with some automatism.

Who tried to create a new world from scratch with Exult Studio will surely understand. Take the trees, for instance: don't you think that Ultima VII's woods where created with some semi-random placement algorythm and then manually adjusted here and there?

[artaxerxes]

you could use "mock_up" to create a map fairly easily for ultima 7.

All you have to do is to create a 192x192 indexed image (BMP, GIF, PNG) of less than 255 colours, create a text file that hold mapping for RGB colours chunk number and launch mock_up with both files as parameters. It will create a u7map, perfect copy of your BMP file.

The first step would then to create chunks (containing trees, walls, etc.), create a BMP and then generate the map with some tweaking.

Artaxerxes

[Andrea B Previtera]

Actually I was asking the question out of curiosity because I am working on the construction of a world upon my own (3d) engine, and by the way I am using a technique exactly like this for the initial terrain setup (although I don't use chunks, each tile holds a list of items so you can have up to 1024x1024 unique tiles).

But this is indeed a good suggestion for who's making a map for the Exult engine!

[drcode]

You could be right. For example, there are several tiles for 'grass', and they may have had a 'fill-random' function for choosing them randomly. It would be a nice function for ExultStudio.

[Ram dragon]

I've done this with the original U4 map. I hacked mockup to use
the equivalent of a "fill-random" function for grass, forest and ocean.
So far I've managed to clean up a lot of coastline and some rivers.

You can get the latest U7MAP conversion here:

http://psych.utoronto.ca/~duncan/ultima/ultima4map.html

Ram Dragon

[artaxerxes]

Being the author of mockup, I'd love to get your patches to integrate them to the source tree.

Thanks!

Artaxerxes

[Dominus]

And I still think Mock-up should be part of the mapedit tools of Exult.

[Ram dragon]

I've posted the source on my page, but my hacked version uses Allegro instead of SDL and relies on the colour index of the pixel rather than the colour value itself.

Ram Dragon

[artaxerxes]

by the way, I'm to Toronto too!

artaxerxes

[Ram Dragon]

Hey cool. Actually, I'm working in Australia at the moment. Been fortunate enough to keep my Toronto account. So are you the UofT?

Ram Dragon

[artaxerxes]

no, I've finished school a long time ago.
I moved to Toronto right after I finished my degree in France.

Artaxerxes