[Map Script] SmartMap

[alms66]

Originally posted by DougM
As to an earth like option ... that would be difficult to do with my script. There's no existing code for managing how something grows, so doing an island chain in a specific place is difficult, and so is weighting the size of continents appropriately. It might be better to just allow someone with a more earth-specific script implement that.

I figured a new script would most likely be the best way to go for all the landmass details, but disregarding that, you could still include the option and have it automatically set all other options to produce the most earth-like end result.

[DougM]

version 4 released

Edit: deleted attachment, version 5 is released!

With this release, I think this map script is pretty close to done. Mostly this release features improved performance (generate maps faster), and a few minor bug fixes. I've had relatively little additional feedback or suggestions, so unless someone comes up with a good idea to add or finds a bug.....


# 4.0
# Overall performance improvement:
# Now down to about:
# <5 seconds for duel,tiny,small
# 10 seconds for standard,
# 40 seconds for large,
# ~2 minutes on huge
# On a 1.8Ghz Pentium-M with 1Gig
# Optimize land placement speed by remembering all potential growth positions
# rather than looking for them randomly.
# Optimized and improved player placement function. No longer makes certain
# rare placement errors, and the speed is dramatically better, particularly
# for continents with a large number of players to be placed (pangea).
# Optimized bonus placement. This used to get very slow on large/huge maps due
# to making a pass through all tiles for each bonus type. Now makes one pass
# through all tiles and caches the result.
# Changed the player option read function to take a string rather than an index
# to make it clearer in code, and also make it impossible to break when
# changing the order of options in the list.
# Land areas are 20,40,90,210,500,1200 (duel,tiny,small,standard,large,huge)
# Compared to 15,24,48,88 ,154,252 for great plains.
# Smartmap rounds down calculated width and height,
# so the areas are not quite as big as they seem,
# but large and huge are noticeably bigger. This allows for more flexible
# use of the ocean coverage option. Note to firaxis: it would be a better
# design if in the expansion pack or a patch you passed the expected land
# area to the grid size function from the current mod! Then maps could
# dynamically size themselves to the expected land area and provide fair
# gameplay regardless of other chosen settings (and be compatible with mods
# that make use of different sized maps ... no more hardcoding like in
# great plains)!
# Note: I can just barely start a huge game with 1Gig memory. This implies
# firaxis is using somewhere in the neighborhood of 32k memory per tile.
# Good grief, what on earth are they storing!
# 3.2
# Add options for specifying weight of initial jungle/forest cover
# More performance optimizations
# 3.1
# Fix rare issue with placements landing too close together
# Slight tweaks to placement scoring to value early resources higher
# Fix issue with placements on separate continents too close together

[DougM]

updated the main post and the sample generations

For anyone interested in this script, have a look at the top of the thread. I've updated the first post with a shot of the new options available in v4, and the sample generations post with some samples from v4. Hopefully this will give everybody a clearer idea of what you get with this script lately.

[DougM]

Originally posted by alms66


I figured a new script would most likely be the best way to go for all the landmass details, but disregarding that, you could still include the option and have it automatically set all other options to produce the most earth-like end result.

So, if you happen to read this: what do you think are the most earthlike options for this script? I've been thinking about a way to make the continents form in a roughly earthlike shape, but I don't know what you earth-centric people think constitutes an earth-like map. (What proportion of hills/mountains looks right, etc).

[alms66]

Originally posted by DougM
So, if you happen to read this: what do you think are the most earth like options for this script? I've been thinking about a way to make the continents form in a roughly earth like shape, but I don't know what you earth-centric people think constitutes an earth-like map. (What proportion of hills/mountains looks right, etc).

Well, that's definitely a very difficult question to answer, given the number of combinations one could try with this script. However, there are a few obvious choices such as heavy for forest/jungle cover, 70% ocean, Temperate climate, and from there it gets more opinionated - which is why this question is probably best answered by a poll of all the users of this script, especially given my limited testing with it.

As for my opinion on the other options, Earth really only has 3 land masses (not counting Antarctica) and those are Australia, Eurasia/Africa, and the Americas, so I'd say 3 landmasses is Earth like. However, your script tends to generate "equal" landmasses vs Earth's vastly different landmasses - which is better for game play, but worse for "earth-likeness".

I'd leave the hills & peaks on a random setting, since those can vary with landmasses too much to predict.

As for terrain/resourse/bonuses, I prefer the default to your Smartmap options (especially for terrain, as yours seems too random and not "clumpy" enough).

Civ placement is a new option which I haven't tested enough to comment on.

[Commander Bello]

There seem to be much less goodie huts, no?

[DougM]

Originally posted by Commander Bello
There seem to be much less goodie huts, no?

I tweaked it down somewhat from earlier versions where it was clearly much more than what the standard gave. Does it seem like a lot less than standard? I'll tweak it back up a bit if so.

Actually, I'll go in and count carefully on a few maps and see what I come up with.

[skodkim]

Everytime I try to start a new custom game using the script I get a "you loose" message even before I begin. It's like I dont get any unts or so. I dont even get to see the map.

I've tried it both with vanilla and with a mod - both with the same result. I've also tried tweaking the settings a bit (player/ressource placement system).

The map I tried was a Huge/ Pangea. I don't have any truble playing this in vanilla.

[DougM]

Originally posted by skodkim
Everytime I try to start a new custom game using the script I get a "you loose" message even before I begin. It's like I dont get any unts or so. I dont even get to see the map.

I've tried it both with vanilla and with a mod - both with the same result. I've also tried tweaking the settings a bit (player/ressource placement system).

The map I tried was a Huge/ Pangea. I don't have any truble playing this in vanilla.

Hmm. You're the first person I've heard of having this problem. One possibility might be running out of memory. Do you have the same issue if you try to start a standard sized map? (Part of the reason I have to ask is that my map script has a larger-than-normal huge size, so it may be that my huge takes up too much memory for your system while vanilla huge does not). A large game on smartmap would actually be closest in dimension to the vanilla huge map.


The only time i've seen this problem is during development when I had all water maps and the units simply could not be placed. If you continue the game after losing, and watch the replay and such, does the map view show an all water map?

And you did say you tried both smartmap and standard player placement? (because if standard doesn't work ... it might just be a civ bug of some sort).

I would really appreciate it if you tried a few of these things, if there is a bug in my script I'd like to find it.

[skodkim]

I tried starting smalle maps and that helped. Must have been some kind of memory issue even though I've got 1.8 GB RAM installed. Just how big are your maps compared to the standard ones?

I've now started a large sized "2 huge lands map" - looks promising

\Skodkim

[Addled Platypus]

error meaasge:

failed to load

extracted where instructed

any ideas?

[DougM]

Originally posted by skodkim
I tried starting smalle maps and that helped. Must have been some kind of memory issue even though I've got 1.8 GB RAM installed. Just how big are your maps compared to the standard ones?

I've now started a large sized "2 huge lands map" - looks promising

\Skodkim

Normal maps are the following sizes (Civ4WorldInfo.xml):
duel 10x6 area = 60
tiny 13x8 area = 104
small 16x10 area = 160
standard 21x13 area = 273
large 26x16 area = 416
huge 32x20 = 640

Each dimension is multiplied by 4, so you really get 16x that many tiles when you play.

On my maps, I start with an area, and pick a widthxheight to fit it, that's how you get the varying shapes instead of the fixed shapes.

duel: 20
tiny: 40
small: 90
standard: 210
large: 500
huge: 1200

Hmm, having made this comparison I think i'm going to tweak this for the next version. I had built my number off of great plains, which on going back I now realize was a bad choice. So I'll tweak this a bit in the next version to bring up the numbers on the smaller maps.

Anyway, the key takeaway here is that huge is nearly twice as big. This is to allow for high ocean levels that leave little land. I desperately wish that civ would tell you how much land it expects rather than just the 'size' of the map.

so i've just redone my calculations based on the standard map sizes, and the next version will be:
duel: 60
tiny: 100
small: 180
standard: 320
large: 560
huge: 1000

Which should be much closer in size to the standard maps and also make huge more likely to be usable.

[DougM]

Originally posted by Platypus Rex
error meaasge:

failed to load

extracted where instructed

any ideas?

Make sure you didn't extract it with a directory. If you look in PublicMaps, you should have a file called SmartMap.py, and NOT a directory called SmartMap containing this file. If you did wind up with the directory, just move the SmartMap.py file up into PublicMaps instead, then delete the SmartMap directory.

Also, you have to go into 'custom game' to get it to show up.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Great stuff.

But I have a slight graphic glitch. At a certain zoom level some of the graphics go dark but only in the area of the map where the wrap occurs. Or is this a general problem in Civ 4?

[DougM]

Originally posted by The Rusty Gamer
Great stuff.

But I have a slight graphic glitch. At a certain zoom level some of the graphics go dark but only in the area of the map where the wrap occurs. Or is this a general problem in Civ 4?

It's a general civiv problem, and occurs at least on any map that doesn't use the standard widths and heights.