26 May, 2012, Oliver wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I've been planning a system for my game that is going to use an absolutely huge, persistent, coordinate-based plane rather than manually built rooms. I've really wanted to incorporate a dynamic description engine into the whole affair, but I've been struggling with the method of generation. Having builders designate the descriptions for thousands upon thousands of rooms is only doable if you want to sink years into it, so I've known I need to do something more elegant.

I decided to look into map-editing programs and I found one that suits my needs really well. In the spirit of MUD fraternity, I figured I'd post here in case any other developers would like to take a look at Tiled Map Editor.

I've only played with it a little bit, but it seems really cool so far. There's a few things that make it super ideal for a MUD.

*Open source
*Supports tile layers for multiple kinds of terrain in the same room
*Supports a flexible variable system for each tile that allows you to specify unique values
*Has plugin support (which facilitates plaintext exporting of mapfiles)
*Both Windows and Linux native

Plugins are written in Java or C++, I believe, but the neat thing about them is that it's really easy to write one that will save the tile data as plain text (or any other format). With a minimal amount of time, a developer could retrofit the program to save tiles to the same format that they already use for their area files.

Anyone else played with Tiled? Hope someone else gets some use out of it at least. :)
27 May, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
I looked at Tiled briefly when I was researching what it would take to make a 2D scroller for iOS.

It seems to me that the only practical use for a MUD would be if you come across a great public domain tileset or if you're a graphical artist yourself and can create one. Otherwise, it seems like overkill to use it to create flat text files.
29 May, 2012, Oliver wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
I looked at Tiled briefly when I was researching what it would take to make a 2D scroller for iOS.

It seems to me that the only practical use for a MUD would be if you come across a great public domain tileset or if you're a graphical artist yourself and can create one. Otherwise, it seems like overkill to use it to create flat text files.


Consider for a moment what I am doing and you'll realize why it's advantageous:

I'm generating thousands of "rooms" (it'll be coordinate-based, probably not real rooms) that are going to be dynamically described. Builders will be able to use a graphical utility to lay down units of terrain (I'll make the tilesets, but I'll probably only need ~100) that will describe themselves contextually based on the surrounding units of terrain and layers.
29 May, 2012, Runter wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Some people have done this with paint like programs and treat each pixel and distinct color as a type. I think Davion went so far as to use PNG as his wilderness area file type.

But I agree, it makes a lot of sense to use a tool for macro editing. Keep in mind that your OLC can be designed in such a way that it's fit for macro editing too. Like implementing flood fill algorithms. Ways to draw lines and paths. Graphical representations in ascii. It's actually quite reasonable from an interface standpoint if done well.
29 May, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Oliver said:
I'm generating thousands of "rooms" (it'll be coordinate-based, probably not real rooms) that are going to be dynamically described. Builders will be able to use a graphical utility to lay down units of terrain (I'll make the tilesets, but I'll probably only need ~100) that will describe themselves contextually based on the surrounding units of terrain and layers.

That's pretty much exactly what I do in GW2 - as there are no rooms, I needed some other way to define the terrain. The world was initialised from a bmp file, then fleshed out using in-game terraforming tools. Each pixel in the bmp file was converted to an in-game tile, with a "tile" defined as 10x10 terrain elements, and each terrain element representing 66x66 feet. The mud also uses the in-game data to generate graphical tiles for the client maps.

After that I defined a list of areas, each of which consists of one terrain type and a rectangular area of the world. Any part of the world within that rectangle that matches the terrain type is classified as part of the specified area, and this determines its name, which monsters spawn there, and so on. For my dynamic description solution, check out this post.
29 May, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Oliver said:
There's a few things that make it super ideal for a MUD.


It sounds like it may be a good tool for the kind of world you are designing, and especially if you're planning to hand things off to non-technical folks. My earlier comment was in response to your broader claim above. Anyway, good luck.
30 May, 2012, Oliver wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
After that I defined a list of areas, each of which consists of one terrain type and a rectangular area of the world. Any part of the world within that rectangle that matches the terrain type is classified as part of the specified area, and this determines its name, which monsters spawn there, and so on. For my dynamic description solution, check out this post.


Oh, I've read it. The design inspiration from what I'll be writing definitely came from you and your MUD. :)


plamzi said:
It sounds like it may be a good tool for the kind of world you are designing, and especially if you're planning to hand things off to non-technical folks. My earlier comment was in response to your broader claim above. Anyway, good luck.


Yeah. I was mostly posting to try to help out other people who have content that is procedurally generated.
31 May, 2012, Jhypsy Shah wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
dig..looks pretty cool. XD
05 Jul, 2012, Nathan wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Battle for Wesnoth, a hextile-based rpg strategy game had maps like this (last I looked:)

usage=map
border_size=1

Re, Re, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg
Gg, Gg, Re, Re, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg
Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Re, Re, Gg, Gg
Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Gg, Re, Re


http://wiki.wesnoth.org/BuildingMaps#Map...

Where the letter code referred to a particular tile. If you mapped (haha) terrain type to a pixel color or a existing tile image, it should be easy to draw, no? You should be able to use any map editor that generates parseable output. At some point, if you code
by colors, you're better of using some kind of image reader since images are probably more compact for storing colored dots.
30 Jul, 2012, Kjwah wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Some people have done this with paint like programs and treat each pixel and distinct color as a type. I think Davion went so far as to use PNG as his wilderness area file type.


We do something like this, we're using a file format I don't much care for but I'm changing that when I revisit the code. I think even Smaug has a snippet that doesn't something like this as well? Whole point of the post.
17 Sep, 2012, dnicolai wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
Alright, so this is kind of a crazy idea that I just had while reading over this, but how about an entirely original system that still uses the regular building styles to make the rooms, but changes the way that they are displayed a bit. Here's my idea.

Each of the squares that we see (including the unpassable walls) are an individual room that a builder makes using OLC. So a room that looks like this:
#############
# \
###–########
# #
# #
# #
# #
# X #
# #
#############


would actually be a 130 room space (13x10). The builders mark out the walls by walking from one room to the next and can set special variables for exits such as stairs and the like. While me saying it's 130 rooms, it would really be incredibly easy to build. I figure it would work like this:

goto 1000 (first room's vnum)
redit roomtype entryway (sets this room as an entrance)
redit entryway up 999 stairs (sets the room's entrance from room 999, to return go up, it also adds the exit type of stairs, so when a player leaves it will say that they go up a flight of stairs)
s (creates room 1001 using the buildwalking feature)
w (creates room 1002, since no flags or actions were put in this room, it's empty)
redit roomtype entryway
redit entryway down 1013 stairs
n
n
redit roomtype wall (sets this room as a wall which is impassable)
e
redit roomtype wall
e
redit roomtype wall
s
redit roomtype wall
s
redit roomtype wall
s
redit roomtype wall
w
redit roomtype wall
w
redit roomtype wall
w
redit roomtype wall
n
redit roomtype wall
n
redit roomtype wall
n
redit roomtype wall
e
redit roomtype wall

This whole style would create the following room:

####
# /#
#\ #
####


I wrote that all out in just a couple of minutes and it would make a dynamic room that players could easily interact with and that builders can design quickly. of course, with a bit of time you could design really cool rooms with this style such as the one I made below:

######
# #
# #
# #
##-#######
# #
# #
\ #
# #
#############
# | #
# # #
#### #
# | #
# # #
#### #
# | #
# # #
####### ####
# #
# #
# #
/ #
##\#


It would take perhaps 20-30 minutes to build that entire place, where most builders would take somewhere between 2-5 days just to map out all of that with descriptions and all that other junk that they are so slow on. Also, it would make it so that importing a D&D module into your mud would be SUPER easy to do since you can map it out using notepad fairly quickly and then just plug it all in with some quick area building. The whole system would have to work on a grid though, to make it so you don't have to create return exits, but that's what this whole thread was about anyways.

Here is an entire zone that I just built in about 10-20 minutes using notepad, building it as a working zone would take probably an hour or two (if that). It's got the top level which is an island with a pier, two stairways going down (the ones I made above) a large area with four rooms, a large holding area, and a small circular area. If anyone's interested, I got the maps from a "Tower of Waiting" campaign I found at the cartographer's guild. Very fun little campaign for anyone running 4th edition ;) :
~~~~~~       ######        #############
~~ ~~~ # # # \
~~\~~~ # # ###–########
~~=~=~ # # # #
~~===~ ##-####### # #
~~ ~~~ # # # #
~~ ~~~ # # # #
~~~~~~ \ # # X #
# # # #
#### ############# #############
# /# # | #
#\ # # # # #//#
#### #### # # #
# | # #–#
#### # # # # #
# /# #### # # #
#\ # # | # # #
#### # # # # #
. ####### #### # #
. # # ####
. # #
. # #
. / #
. ##\#
18 Sep, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
dnicolai said:
It would take perhaps 20-30 minutes to build that entire place, where most builders would take somewhere between 2-5 days just to map out all of that with descriptions and all that other junk that they are so slow on.

Or you could spend 20-30 seconds drawing it in Paint (or scanning it from a hand-drawn picture), and the mud could load the file at startup, with each pixel representing one room.


But anyway, on the subject of editors, has anyone played around with Roll20? I tried it out yesterday, and it looks quite good - although far less powerful than MapTool, it's also much easier to use.
18 Sep, 2012, Idealiad wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
How do you export the maps?
23 Sep, 2012, Oliver wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
I didn't realize that this old thread had been resurrected. I'm with KaVir here, I prefer to use a graphical interface. When I played around with Tiled back in the day (like four months ago), I loved it because it could export the data to a format (like C) that was already really easy to use with a traditional MUD. If you used BMPs, it could be neat, but would require more work.

I haven't checked out Roll20 but I'm going to. I'll post if I think of anything interesting to do with it.
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