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Request: Randomized Maps


DNK

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Why not?

Simple: make submap buildings include surrounding ground/props so they are a whole and complete map 'segment'. Then make "template maps" that have a basic outline (like a street down the middle with the alien ship area and Xeno ship area preset) and then fill the rest of these maps with these submaps. The submaps will be randomized by having multiple submap choices within each folder, right?

And so you have a mostly randomized map each time you load it.

This is how the original game did it, and I see no reason it can't be done now, today with the current system.

So, why not yet?

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I take it you've read my post in the other thread, so you've read the discussion between myself and Mothman. It's been a looong while since I tried my hand at mapmaking, but I would guess from my experiences and talking to Mothman that totally random maps can be more trouble than they are worth, and it's just easier to make a hand-crafted map rather than make sure each submap is competely in tune with all the other submaps and there aren't jarring breaks between submap. Stinky? Flashman? Moxar? You three have done a lot of mapmaking. Would your custom submaps play nice in a randomly generated map?

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If I'm reading your post right, I guess my reply to "so, why not yet?" would be that I already tried it for farm and arctic in Stinky Maps 2, and town and industrial will require a LOT more time before I can get a decent amount of randomisation in due to the relative complexity of the maps/submaps, as well as the predominance of set features such as roads. I haven't tried making town/ind random yet, but hopefully I will at some point in the future.

Warning! A long and boring walkthrough of my farm and arctic maps follows!

A large part of the reason why I chose farm as my first tileset with the submap editor was to try this method out. My farm maps use:

- a submap called RandomPropField. This chooses one of 25 different submaps. They're simple to create, especially the haybale ones, and take up a 20x20 area. Feel free to make your own and add them, as long as you don't use the middle 2x2 square block and outlying squares, as those are reserved for spawning aliens.

- farmhouse submaps, currently around 5 different submaps.

- general building submaps: barns, sheds, storage, stables and the like. There's 12 of these. There's also another version that has a 50% chance to not generate any of these buildings, just an empty space.

The set features are roads and walls. I did trial a randomWall submap, but it was a flop. I could make a randomRoad, but I'm not going to until I've done more stuff for other tilesets.

FarmStink 2 lightscout and corvette maps also have Grassy4Props, a submap which has 8 different patterns.

Arctic maps use randomDenseProps and randomSparseProps. These are the same deal as farm's random prop fields, except split into "7+ props" and "fewer than 7 props" categories.

I take it you've read my post in the other thread, so you've read the discussion between myself and Mothman. It's been a looong while since I tried my hand at mapmaking, but I would guess from my experiences and talking to Mothman that totally random maps can be more trouble than they are worth, and it's just easier to make a hand-crafted map rather than make sure each submap is competely in tune with all the other submaps and there aren't jarring breaks between submap. Stinky? Flashman? Moxar? You three have done a lot of mapmaking. Would your custom submaps play nice in a randomly generated map?

There's no doubt that it's easier and quicker to completely handcraft maps. It'll be less of an issue later when more people get into mapmaking (hopefully), but right now, it's a question of: do you want more maps, or fewer maps that have a bit of variation?

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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The difficulty with the idea of random submap's is that you lose control of the density. How do you make it truly random without the possibility of it being too full or too empty.

The other major issue is ground tiles. Either you have a road or you dont. The way that roads work, you would have to have a additional submaps that make things like roads appear and the whole mess just gets really complicated if you want it to look good. The use of pre-set size submaps also means that the maps look very rigid. I think that is why Chris decided not to use stinkys ideas in the main game. You can try and be more creative by mixing submap sizes but for instance a town with shops will need a road to make sense. therefore you will always know that there is a road in the same spot, no matter how random the buildings around it become. Follow the layout of the road and ground tiles and you will find the map just as familiar as if it was custom map

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I don't think the density problem is impossible to solve. It's a matter of splitting it into subcategories. I've probably not yet got it right, but I reckon there is a sweet spot.

I agree about ground tiles, though.

Also, having played my town and industrial maps in the game proper, I'm not sure that buildings having random layouts is actually a big deal. The movement and spawn locations of enemies feel like they make more of a difference than the interior of the buildings. The exterior is generally the same for gameplay purposes, acting as one great big LoS block. This makes random buildings (as opposed to random props like in farm and arctic, and probably desert when I make maps for it) more of a visual trick than a gameplay one, and I've got enough on my plate as far as making my stuff look better's concerned.

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The difficulty with the idea of random submap's is that you lose control of the density. How do you make it truly random without the possibility of it being too full or too empty.

The earth is not made of balanced areas. Some areas are too full, other too empty. If you make maps trying to have them balanced, they look and feel artificial. Random maps are the only way to provide the feeling a true map would have. There are missions that have to deal with areas that are hopelessly empty, with no cover anywhere, and other areas are so full of cover that it is tedious to move from one to other, constantly searching for possible enemy ambushes.

It is my humble opinion that worrying about maps being "balanced" takes out much of the game. One of the strongest points of the X-COM: EU and X-COM: TFTD was the random maps. Why did they not worry about them being balanced, I wonder?

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There are missions that have to deal with areas that are hopelessly empty, with no cover anywhere, and other areas are so full of cover that it is tedious to move from one to other, constantly searching for possible enemy ambushes.

But what if you get several "tedious" maps in a row, followed by another several that are so barren the aliens pick you off from distance. If that's someone's first experience with Xenonauts, what would the replay value of the game be for them?

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different game, different time. different expectations on complexity of maps and different level of graphics. All these things contribute to making the old style of randomness very hard to replicate. Especially with so many tile sets being developed at the same time.

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But what if you get several "tedious" maps in a row, followed by another several that are so barren the aliens pick you off from distance. If that's someone's first experience with Xenonauts, what would the replay value of the game be for them?

This can be easily handled by assigning values to the end result of a random map, so that you know what was spawned and avoid getting such things by retrying if that is, for example, the 3rd time in a row that you get the same density map.

Still, the OG developers managed to avoid that, somehow. Can't we learn from them?

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I'm trying to see the variable density problem. However I look though, I fail to see.

How is having variable maps, every single one demanding another strategy, boring?

But what if you get several "tedious" maps in a row, followed by another several that are so barren the aliens pick you off from distance. If that's someone's first experience with Xenonauts, what would the replay value of the game be for them?

They can go back to playing Hugo, or perhaps Starcraft.

Back in 1994, nobody asked about how we'd receive variable maps. They knew we'd be delighted to have them, and they were damn right.

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I get the distinct impression that people are trying to bash down a door that's already open. The mechanisms for random submaps have not been removed. Stinky already has made maps which use random submaps, and has communicated his experiences of doing it. Armed with all this knowledge, and the functionality, and the tools, why then don't the people who want randominity just freakin' do it. You're not going to get any of the Goldhawk crew to do it. They've made the concious decision to handcraft Goldhawk maps, and have enhanced the level editor to make hancrafting easier.

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Well, I think the best we can get for the vanilla game is a friggin' ton of sub maps, so we can have lots and lots of variety there. That I'd be alright with.

Also, making the UFO spawn in more than one place, even if it's only different by half a dozen tiles or so, would make a lot of difference. We can keep the "path" to the UFO or whatever Chris wants it to be like, just make two adjacent spawn points, or maybe switch the chinook and UFO spawn points just to shake things up a bit occasionally.

Pseudo-random (through tons of individual maps and tons of submaps per map) is okay with me.

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I get the distinct impression that people are trying to bash down a door that's already open. The mechanisms for random submaps have not been removed. Stinky already has made maps which use random submaps, and has communicated his experiences of doing it. Armed with all this knowledge, and the functionality, and the tools, why then don't the people who want randominity just freakin' do it. You're not going to get any of the Goldhawk crew to do it. They've made the concious decision to handcraft Goldhawk maps, and have enhanced the level editor to make hancrafting easier.

Yeah, really. This is pretty much how I feel. And at the risk of sounding aggressive, it was kinda frustrating having Goetikmagus say, "Boy, random maps would sure be nice!" directly after Max's post.

Do you feel that maps are too static? Then download Stinky Map Pack 2, play the arctic and farm maps, and let me know how they feel. I can't be objective about them, as I created them. If I don't get feedback, they won't improve.

These are the sort of things I'd love to know:

  • Are they too predictable? It could be that the set features are too dominant. Or is it alright that the random sections are less pronounced?

  • Is density variation a problem? Farm maps have random submaps with the whole lot mixed together: crowded cover props, fairly barren fields, heavy amounts of LoS blockers...do you find it detrimental to gameplay? On the other hand, arctic maps feature more-than-6 and less-than-6 random prop submaps. So do you find the arctic maps more enjoyable than the farm ones or vice versa? Or do they all suck?

  • Do I need to make more farm/arctic maps, or should I carry on doing stuff for town/industrial? Bear in mind town/ind require a million times more work on the submaps to make them random, so at the moment, the town/ind maps are fairly static.

  • Are people not aware how easy it is to get into map making, or even that they already have the tools to do so sitting in their Xenonauts folder? Generally speaking, it's the submaps that take a lot of time. Do you want me to make a map making tutorial and put it in Flash's sticky at the top of the forum?
Also, making the UFO spawn in more than one place, even if it's only different by half a dozen tiles or so, would make a lot of difference. We can keep the "path" to the UFO or whatever Chris wants it to be like, just make two adjacent spawn points, or maybe switch the chinook and UFO spawn points just to shake things up a bit occasionally.

Pseudo-random (through tons of individual maps and tons of submaps per map) is okay with me.

One of the guidelines is to not do this. It's one of the guidelines I agree with, as the argument is that intelligent spawn placement's that much harder if the start and end points of the map are too haphazard. At first I felt as you did, but when I played my maps with multiple UFO/Naut ship spawns, I came around the to devs' point of view.

It's also impractical once you get to corvettes, let alone the bigger ships. Corvettes take up something like a 20x20 section of the map; the maps tend to be 60x60 at that point. Multiple corv spawns would cause there to be large stretches of barren land. If you only move them a bit, like you suggest, it doesn't really make any difference from my playthroughs. Sorry. ):

The solution, really, is map variants. So if you try my arctic/farm maps and find the ship spawns too static, let me know and I'll make some variants where I swap the spawns around, and tweak the map to accomodate that.

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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Stinky, you inspire me. I shall take up the banner. However, it's been so long for me that if you were to put up a baby's first steps it would be ever so nice so when I flail about (especially with the submap editor) I have a point of guidance to turn to.

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Wait there are no random maps? I was wondering already why I see the same map twice after 3 Ufos! This pisses me really off now. I would have never bought the game if I knew that before.....big time fail

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The difficulty with the idea of random submap's is that you lose control of the density. How do you make it truly random without the possibility of it being too full or too empty.

What is wrong with getting handed some maps with less advantages, and others more, that's part of the fun with randomness, as long as it looks semi believable I would be sold.

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its not simply about density for difficulty, but you could accidently end up with maps that break vehicles because they need 3x3 movement or you could end up in Turkey shoot and loose all your troops coming off the ramps. Its a fine balancing act.

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its not simply about density for difficulty, but you could accidently end up with maps that break vehicles because they need 3x3 movement or you could end up in Turkey shoot and loose all your troops coming off the ramps. Its a fine balancing act.

But somehow it was never a problem back in the old days. You tank gets stuck, you won't use it this time, doh. Have fun with your 6 troopers against the alien terror. :)

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I think people have higher expectations of what they want and they have grown to expect things to work all the time. If your tank got stuck because of the way a map worked then a review site would destroy the game for its poor quality/infuriating map design.

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