Map Generator Model

[Mark_Everson]

mca (and Paul too...):

Looks cool. If the red are mountains, they already look more realistic than civ I can't wait to see it when you move the plates around a little more vigorously.

Great Work!

Mark

[alms66]

I noticed that the model lacks some detail in the climate area. For instance you've only included polar temperate, and tropical, but there are more zones than that. You should also include sub-arctic sub-tropical, and divide the temperate zones in both hemispheres into two seperate parts. The reason for dividing the temperate zone is that it is the largest of them and there is much variation from the Polar half compared to the half nearer the equator.
So you bands would be:
arctic (1)
sub-arctic (2)
cool temperate (3)
warm temperate (4)
sub-tropical (5)
tropical (6)
equator ---
tropical (7)
sub-tropical (8)
warm temperate (9)
cool temperate (10)
sub-arctic (11)
arctic (12)
Another thing is the terrain. We need to include polar ice caps. Submarines would be able to travel under them and tanks could roll on them. Ships could wreck due to icebergs near the caps to make sea travel a little more realistic and a little more treacherous. With the polar caps we could include a chance of loosing nearly any military unit due to cold, doubled if you have no supplies, reduced with certain technologies.
[This message has been edited by Toubabo_Koomi (edited November 22, 1999).]

[mca]

Minor progress has been made on the Map Generator. Current status, prototype source code, and screenshots are available at http://danish.visl.ou.dk/~mca/clash/ .

Please note that previously posted links to source code and screenshots are now invalid.

Martin
[This message has been edited by mca (edited November 21, 1999).]

[Paul Crocker]

TB: Thanks for the comments - in case I didn't mention it in the posting, the model described there is preliminary (and has already been updated quite a bit from that outline). Don't worry - we'll implement some of your suggestions in the climate model. We're shooting for a compromise between playability and realism, though, so we probably won't be able to do everything. Subs moving under the ice caps FE, unless Mark is interested in working up some kind of cool movement model to incorporate movement over the North Pole on a Mercator projection (not easily done due to the extreme distortion at the poles!)

[alms66]

Paul--
If the layering of graphics is going to be used (which it looks like it is), you could apply the same technique here with a little use of transparent graphics. The polar ice itself would be semi-transparent. The submarine could become semi-transparnt when it submerges, which could be an actual order for the TF. Then when a sub moved "onto" it, it would give the appearance of being underneath the ice. This would also give the appearnce of it being under water when it submerges at sea also.


I don't know if any of you have ever played Call to Power, it sucked , they had two really good things that I did liked.
For one you could take the option of playing on a doughnut world. With that on you could move not only east-west off the map but also north-south, which was very cool, and I think we should eventually include it.
The other was the semi-transparent "Fog of War". I really liked this one because it was cool when you placed a radar station how the fog lifted.

[This message has been edited by Toubabo_Koomi (edited November 22, 1999).]

[Paul Crocker]

Toubabo:

Since this really has little to do with graphics, it's a bit OT, but since you asked the question here, I'll answer it here. If you wish to pursue it in more depth, I suggest that we either find a more closely related thread or start a new one
I think that you may have misunderstood my last posting (I apologize if I was unclear). We can easily display subs under the polar caps - the problem is with the map projection itself and with how we handle the movement of units on that projection. There was a thread that dealt with this back in late August or early September (do a search on "projection" and "Albers" and it should come up). We're using what's basically a Mercator projection. If you're unfamiliar with that term, think of the map you may have seen (often in elementary school) that shows a huge representation of Greenland in proportion to the rest of North America. While this projection is OK for many things, it's terrible for displaying anything near the poles due to the distortion (that increases the closer you get to the poles). The problem we would face is this: picture a sub going over the pole from North America...it crosses the north pole and heads south towards Russia. On our flat map, it would head "up" the map from N. America and pop up further east (or west depending on how you look at it) at the top of the map heading "down" the map. While not impossible, it's an aberration from the normal movement mechanics that Mark is working on. He can probably give you a better answer on whether it's really "doable" or if it's not worth the work involved. As far as using a different projection (like your donut), we've already discussed that topic to death in past threads (you should do a search on those if you really want to pursue this, so as to not repeat anything that we've already discussed). As to your original posting - I'll look into expanding on the temperate zones (I had already given some thought to it, but you just gave me greater incentive to do so)

Nonetheless - thanks for the comments! Even if we can't implement them, they are still valuable Keep 'em coming.

[Mark_Everson]

TK, Paul:

We might do something about polar movement Eventually, but it would be a kludge added in near the end. I'd prefer to put off discussion on such things until we get more of the basic model and code implemented.

Fog of war will be handled in some way TBD. That's more of a military issue.


MCA:

Hi. Glad to hear from you. Hope everything's going well with you. The GNU Lesser General Public License concerned me for a bit, but it Does look like the right way to merge open-source parts into Clash. I'll need to look into some details later...


MCA & Paul:

Some of the continents look Very geometric. I assume we can take care of that easily, by giving the initial plates more "texture" at the start...

[johnmcd]

Paul and MCA:

What a beaut. I just looked at this and the associated web site, I'm amazed. I think the worlds it produce are very authentic looking.
Thats all.

[mca]

Mark:

Don't worry, the very polygonal shapes of the continents and the very linear mountains are not features, but broken features, as noted on the page. The issue will therefore be addressed in future releases

The LGPL permits open source modules to be linked to proprietary code, so I expect there should no problems with the licence.

Martin

[Henrique Duarte]

Hi everybody

I am a geology researcher and my MS (soon to be I hope :-) is in gold and tungsten deposits so I believe I can answer Mark on the reasonable location of resources.

There are plenty of papers on Plate-tectonics, geodynamics vs resources
We can assign a probabilty of a resource existing on a square according to a tectonic classification that we could give to the square:

Is it a recent plate boundary (ocean vs continent, continent vs continent), an old plate boundary, a forebasin etc etc
Then we can give a probability of each resource appearing in each of those types of squares according to known actual relations

here are some of these relations

Copper porphiry deposits (I am not sure whow to spell these) are very comon on recent mountain ranges in ocean-continent boundaries

massive sulphides (tin and coper) on old oceanic basins and recent ocean plates

and this can go on and on - it will only depend on what resources you want.

[Mark_Everson]

Henrique:

That's Great! Here is a list off the top of my head of the major geology-related resources. I don't know if we will use all of these, but this is pretty close to a probable final list.

Gold, silver, gemstones (could be a variety of types)
tin, iron, possibly copper, aluminum (bauxite)
coal, oil and uranium

I'm sure others will chime in if I have missed anything of vital importance.

[Krenske]

Mark,
I think you have covered the basic geological resources, the only extras I can think of are generally quite rare and are probably only good for trade in the modern era (Titanium, Tungsten).

Extra idea 1. Deposit types.
I don't know if it has been mentioned yet but could it be possible to have 3 types of deposit surface, mineable and deep. A surface deposit requires no mine to gain the benefit, rare but immeadiately useful. Mineable is as is currently available in Civ2 requiring a mine. Deep could be a new type where GEOLOGY needs to be learnt before you can detect the deposit. This gives all those Explorer/geologists something to do in the later game. It may be possible to include a special Mine improvement for Deep deposits.

Extra idea 2. Resource Exhaustion.
Many of the deposits around the world that were originally mined have now degraded. The copper and iron deposits in Turkey for example, Aluvial gold in California. Could deposits be given a "life"? This could be hard to implement but may be a nice feature. (To go with the above, many surface deposits could have limited lives, while mineable and deep deposits remain)

Extra Idea 3. Yield/Quality.
Way to many ideas. Variable yields for deposits. A gold mine is not necessarily the same as any other. Maybe the yields could vary by 1.

Feel free to ignore whatever you don't want.
[This message has been edited by Krenske (edited January 19, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Krenske:

We potentially could do any or all of these. We already have the yield idea, if not the quality part of that in the model. Exhaustion can easily be modeled, my take on it was just which was the most fun for the player, perma-resources or exhaustible ones. The depth of deposits is something that we don't have in their yet, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it! That's probably the most important of the three.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Uranium should be Uranium 235. 238, the natural state is much more common. 235 is what is used for nuclear power.

Also Nickle and platinum. Also make sure diamonds are common. They really are in this world but because of politics/economics many of the diamond mines are never mined because the price would drop drastically. Any time one is discovered now days it is bought out by the largest diamond mining company in the world to keep prices high.

Also marble and perhaps oil shale.

[Henrique Duarte]

I see where you are leading.
I will try to give a complete modelling (as close as possible to the map generator) on surface and depth resources.
we can have one of two approaches
1. Each square will have a basic level of every resource according to geological setting (only when it is clearly a geological stupidity will he assign 0 to any resource, which as Lord Ginai holds true to diamonds (well this one is in fact the worst example because is one of the few resources that is EXTREMLY constrained in geological terms, but the idea is quite true). The resource will be split into deep and shallow also according to geological setting. As mining starts the base level will be reduced accordding to a log function. (resources will go down fast, but it is dificult to achieve total depletion of a resource on the game scale)

2. Just simulate very large deposits - geologic anomalies - in this case it is a bit useless to simulate deep/shallow or depletion issues. Large anomalies are LARGE anomalies.

seeing you