February 5, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 7: The Object

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about an object. A simple object is something that you could pick up and take with you. Perhaps as small as a glowing grain of sand on a dark deserted Highway, or as large as broken cart. So, what kind of objects are you likely to find? perhaps something mundane or magical, common or creepy. A toy, instrument, book, tool? What about a cheese wheel or loaf of moldy bread?

February 3, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 6: The Building

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about a building. Unlike ruins, buildings are usually inhabited or at least inhabitable. What you find will somewhat be determined by the type of building. What kind of buildings can we have? pretty much anything that you could find in a small town or city is eligible. A simple farmhouse, a brothel, a tavern an Inn. Perhaps a trading post, fortress, windmill, waterwheel or castle.

February 3, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 5: The Trail

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about a trail. There are many types of trails you can stumble upon- a trail of destruction, a trail of blood, of slime; perhaps a bandit left a trail of coins or breadcrumbs. Are there foot prints, hoofprints, sled tracks, moose tracks? Is it an animal, a humanoid, a machine or a monster? is the weather affecting it? how old is it? Is it dangerous?

February 3, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 4: The Vegetation

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about some odd vegetation. How can vegetation be odd? Perhaps its a dead zone? Scorched from a dragon? locusts have ruined it? A drought? Perhaps it’s unusually sized? Does it look healthy or sickly? Is there a creature that has contaminated it, made it better, or is dependent on it? are there corpses nearby? Is it grasslands? a clutch of trees? an orchard or field?

February 3, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 3: The Sculpture

Lets look at the third type of location generation: the Sculpture. What type of sculpture is it, a statue? relief carving? stone, wood, metal? lifelike or abstract? is the artist unknown, minor or famous? how big is it? how do the locals feel about it? what is the lore related to it? Does it have any type of power? During your travels, you stumble across a [small/medium/large] [stone/granite/wood/oak] [carving//engraving/statue] of a [creature/human/elf/orc/man].

February 3, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 2: The Battleground

Continuing on with my location generation, lets look at another type: the Battleground. What do we know about battlegrounds? are they fresh? ancient? how are they recognized? is there lore? are they well known? During your travels, you stumble across the site of a[n ancient/ recent] battle. The field is [several/dozens of/hundreds of] yards in length and littered with bones and rusted weapons. Nearby you find the signs of a mass grave.

February 2, 2013

Hey, what’s that? Part 1: The Ruins

So my CityGenerator is cool and all, but cities aren’t the only interesting thing to stumble across in the world. So what else is there? What else would an adventurer run into that isn’t an “encounter”? I’m looking for things that people can run across that lead to encounters and further flesh out the world. So far I have them broken into the following types: ruins battleground sculpture vegetation trail building object herd traveler magical disaster military holy sign landform So lets start with the Ruins.

January 13, 2013

Beyond my Ability, Part 4

So, a major update. I reached out to both amitp and rhill to better understand their codebases and was able to get a rough map implementation in. After hours upon hours of grueling work, I now have not one, but three maps for use with my city generator- a continent map, a region map, and a city map. Still a lot of work left, but it’s looking pretty good.

December 25, 2012

Beyond my Ability, Part 3

As I continue to translate Amit’s actionscript to javascript, it is becoming increasingly obvious that I’m missing a crucial part of this codebase- the actual voronoi diagram. Since this is a level of math that is beyond my ability, I’m going to cheat and find another implementation. Raymond Hill has a demo and a nice MIT-licensed library that may be exactly what I need. After I examine the API, perhaps I can figure out how much the map.

December 23, 2012

Beyond my Ability, Part 2

So I have two ways to go about implementing this- read through Amit’s actionscript and try to implement it in java, or read though his article and randomly mishmash internet code together to get a working prototype. While it’s tempting to just swipe other people’s code, that won’t help me understand how it works. So, I guess the first part is to start with a simple HTML5 page with a canvas.