Map generators

[hydrazine]

HI all,
I had a boring weekend recently and was playing around with armagetron maps..
I made a map generator that converts parametric curves into walls, and a wrapper that simplifies this by making the wall-curves an XML tag of sorts..

It comes with circles, a sine wave, a cool equation that makes a sort of arrowhead shape, and also allows for a Z component which controls wall height - I did a cool spiral that gets taller as it approaches the center.
It's very beta, and not meant to be super awesome software, but it will totally make some cool shapes without all the hastle..
It's perl, so you'll need to know a little perl to really get anything out of it.
If I had more time I'd polish it up and make it user friendly, but what can ya do

if anyone's interested let me know.
attached is a double spiral fortress map, it's pretty large but you can speed up with braking to see the whole map.

-H2NNH2

[Tank Program]

Looks funky. I bet it's extrodinarily hard to navigate.

[Jonathan]

What is it doing in Anonymous/hydrazine?

When I tried it it spawned me about half a unit away from a wall. With the default 30 speed and 1 rubber that means you need good timing based on the countdown timer or an inhuman reaction time.

[hydrazine]

Like I said, it's not perfect... I didn't have the time to actually configure rubber and speed settings for that particular map, the ones I'm using are set in my config file...
It's not an example of an arena that you can put right on a server right now.
I was showing you guys what the generator does: it makes walls based on parametric curves... Throw some rubber into your configuration file or add the setting option to the map and voilla... It's not so bad, and I think it looks cool.

You'll probably find a lot of things wrong with the map, but I'm only talking about the walls.

I just thought someone out there might be interested.

It's in Anonymous/hydrazine because I've had a lot of trouble getting those XML designations working... I'm on OSX and there are actually two folders that contain maps - only one of them actually works... So I just put it in the one place that was easiest to deal with...

-H2NNH2

[Jonathan]

I didn't have too much trouble navigating it once I got away from my unfortunate spawn alive; the problem is really the spawn. But yes, this isn't what it's about, although I can imagine it's hard to view the map in Arma for some.

I don't really see the problem with the paths. If it works when put under Anonymous, it should work when put under hydrazine in the same tree. I can confirm that it works on OS X.

[hydrazine]

yeah, I thought the wall-height thing was really cool until I realized that smaller heights become really hard to see - especially with the whole wall thickness issue (being invisible at certain positions) It's a little better if the height is applied to a continuous wall instead of segments because players can then anticipate the existence of a wall.

Perhaps a spiral with walls at proper axis angles would be easier to navigate?

Are there good examples of configurations for things such as capture the flag-style maps, or the hockey-skyball thing? are dtd files configurable and is there documentation on how they work? I assume the dtd is some sort of XML command mapper?

-H2NNH2

[Jonathan]

yeah, I thought the wall-height thing was really cool until I realized that smaller heights become really hard to see - especially with the whole wall thickness issue (being invisible at certain positions)

I ran it at a high resolution so it didn't really become a problem despite the distance of my normal custom camera, but I did notice how they would be like lines of subpixel width at times.

Perhaps a spiral with walls at proper axis angles would be easier to navigate?

I think that would help a little.

Are there good examples of configurations for things such as capture the flag-style maps, or the hockey-skyball thing?

The resource browser might have some examples. The wiki seems to have an informal specification of the Sty patches (too lazy to look them up for you).

are dtd files configurable and is there documentation on how they work? I assume the dtd is some sort of XML command mapper?

The Document Type Definition defines the structure of the file. You can presumably make your own to be more stringent, but normally the DTD for the targeted Arma version should do.

Uploading a screenshot of my spawn problem so that those who didn't try it can see it.

[hydrazine]

hehe, I can see how the spawning location is frustrating

Thanks for the tips johnathan

-H2NNH2

[wrtlprnft]

For those who want to see that the map clearly has some interesting ideas without actually playing it:

[hydrazine]

here's one that's incomplete. The idea is the have 5 "gates" on each side of a large sumo zone in the center...
I should probably add more axes because the gates are at strange angles and hard to navigate - I couldn't get the spawn angle to work properly for the gates on the far sides which are at, um, I think 45 degrees from the horizontal axis... I got the 90 and 67.5 spawn angles working (if I recall correctly) so you spawn facing the center, but for some reason the 45 just won't work - maybe because spawn angles are quantized by the axes you define?

anyway, only half of the gates are complete, so just one side...
The only tedious thing about this map + the generator is that it's a little annoying to nail the start & stop angles for the circular spawn rooms and the sumo(center) boundary. Other than that I did this half-map in about 30 minutes (that includes calculations and such).
-H2NNH2

[hydrazine]

oh yeah, the map is LARGE. So set your arena size way down to see map in a single view, and beware the spawining of AI bikes in your spawn circle, the navigation is tough and they can easily block you in...

the white zone is supposed to be multiple sumo zones, it's an XML placeholder for now, until I figure out how sumo zones work.
-H2NNH2

[hydrazine]

just discovered screenshots
here's the sunshinesumo map

[Tank Program]

Why does it look like something's not quite right there? (Still looks cool though.)