Map balancing and editing tool

[novice]

Some features I think could be useful:

Balance checker:
- Calculate total food, production and commerce potential for each sphere of influence.
- Add different traversal costs for different terrain types (jungle, desert, coast, ocean, land) - and possibly make those costs configurable by the user.
- Option for making the SoI calculator traverse the entire starting landmass before starting spreading to the islands.
- Cyneheard: I do think including good (FP, Oasis, Rivers) and bad (Tundra, desert) tiles in the reports would help a lot in checking balance.

Block editing:
- Copy and paste a block/selection of land
- Rotate a block/selection of land
- Mirror a block/selection of land
- Layered editing (a la photoshop or Paint.NET)
- Calculate balance summary for a selected portion of land

Visualization
- Display resources, hills, rivers, features (forests/jungle/etc)
- Highlight resource types selected by the user
- Navigable map (zoom, pan)

As for Zakalwe's suggested map script, that would be cool but I think a different project. I know nothing about map scripts.

[Mardoc]

Oops, there was a dll missing. I zipped it together in an "installation package", here:

That fixed it; it now works perfectly for a test BtS map.

Is there any chance of making it work for FFH maps? It still crashes when I attempt to load one of those.

[Krill]

Some features I think could be useful:

Balance checker:
- Calculate total food, production and commerce potential for each sphere of influence.
- Add different traversal costs for different terrain types (jungle, desert, coast, ocean, land) - and possibly make those costs configurable by the user.
- Option for making the SoI calculator traverse the entire starting landmass before starting spreading to the islands.

Block editing:
- Copy and paste a block/selection of land
- Rotate a block/selection of land
- Mirror a block/selection of land
- Layered editing (a la photoshop or Paint.NET)
- Calculate balance summary for a selected portion of land

Visualization
- Display resources, hills, rivers, features (forests/jungle/etc)
- Highlight resource types selected by the user
- Navigable map (zoom, pan)

As for Zakalwe's suggested map script, that would be cool but I think a different project. I know nothing about map scripts.

Darrell mentioned in one of the other threads that this would be a really cool thing to integrate into a map script, so I'll copy my thoughts on that in here. Building on your notion of a sphere of influence, you could basically create a map script that would generate highly balanced yet potentially quite asymmetric maps. One way to do it could be something like this:

1. Randomly place a set of N starting positions, with a reasonable minimum spacing.

2. Compute the Voronoi diagram for the map based on those N points. If some of the cells end up with what you deem to be too many or too few neighbors, try again from step 1.

3. For each of the N starting positions, generate an equal-sized random land shape contained within its Voronoi cell, constituting its sphere of influence. Depending on map parameters, you could ensure that the land within each cell touches the land within each neighboring cell, or enforce the opposite restriction, creating a continents map.

4. Place resources and terrain in a balanced way within each sphere of influence.

If you want swathes of wilderness, you could optionally achieve this by generating some number of "phantom" starting positions, treated in the same way as the others, except that you don't actually place a player there when you're done. That could unbalance things though, since some players could have easier access to the wilderness than others.

If you did that, well, no need to buy any more computer games for a few years.

[novice]

That fixed it; it now works perfectly for a test BtS map.

Is there any chance of making it work for FFH maps? It still crashes when I attempt to load one of those.

Haha, that request didn't take long.

I anticipated this when writing the code, but the tool must either:
a) Hardcode certain facts about the game, such as which terrain types there are and which resources are provide food, health, strategic value and happiness.
b) Read all this information from relevant xml files.

Needless to say I went for a) for now...

[novice]

Btw, here's a useful compilation of maps collected by Spaceman.
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4579

[SevenSpirits]

Nice! Though it's still crashing on many of the RB maps I happen to have lying around. (Because of the player colors?)

Also: It is erroneously not counting clam as a food resource (only as a health resource).

[Krill]

It's crashijng for me on all of the maps I've opened (PBEM2, PB2)

[Mardoc]

Haha, that request didn't take long.

Needless to say I went for a) for now...

I actually assumed that - but I don't have a good feel for the kind of effort it would take to remove one set of assumptions and add a replacement set. So I have no idea if I'm asking for a 15 minute project or a 15 hour project here.

Nevertheless, I have to agree with Krill, this is awesome.

[zakalwe]

If you did that, well, no need to buy any more computer games for a few years.

I've never looked at a map script either, but my impression is that it's just a Python script with a fairly loose coupling to the core of the game, so it shouldn't be all that complex for a competent programmer. I don't actually play Civ anymore these days, so that's why I'm not up for the task. But I certainly think it is feasible. Generating the spheres of influence and land shape shouldn't really be all that hard to code; filling in the actual terrain and resources probably takes more programming effort. Hopefully you could steal something from existing map scripts to do that part well.

I also agree that it's an orthogonal project to what Novice is doing. It just borrows the same concept of a "sphere of influence".

[Maestro]

A few nerd questions:

What are you writing this in? I assume something .NET - C# maybe? I'm a professional Java developer, and haven't ever worked with C#, but I'd be willing to cut my teeth on it for a project like this. Would you be open to contributions from others?

Is there a spec for the WBSave format? I opened one and it's just plaintext, which means it's easily parseable, but I'd really rather not try to reverse engineer the grammar.