Beleriand Status

[wobbly]

download-able?

[Nick]

download-able?

You can get the latest source from the project page if you want; I don't have a compiled version up anywhere at the moment.

Pretty much everything will change at some point - I'm really just getting the building blocks in place now. But it is actually worth starting a game just to see HMs Gates

EDIT: Current work is on getting rivers and roads in place, btw.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Cool! I'm glad some of my drawings might make it in. I had a rare streak of free time and it was good to have something to work on.

[Nick]

Cool! I'm glad some of my drawings might make it in. I had a rare streak of free time and it was good to have something to work on.

They will all make it in in some form or other - I'm not going to waste excellent design from someone who is good at it (as opposed to, say, me). The only problem I have is that I changed the scale by a factor of 10 after you drew them, so there will have to be some transformation. But if you feel like doing any more at any stage, that would be great. In chunks of 22x22, with each grid representing 8x8 yards. You have my email

Also, I was wondering for a moment there what a rare steak had to do with free time...

[Nick]

In case anyone's interested, here's what might be regarded as a working map. I generated it as a (much-needed, as any detailed inspection will show) sanity check for river generation. Each pixel is a chunk (so 1/100 of a square mile) from the scale map upthread.

The rivers have so far taken forever, mainly thinking how to get the data files in the right form for actual use, but also data entry and processing. Once I have them done it's on to roads, which should be a breeze after rivers. Then I can start on wilderness generation, and there's the small detail of gameplay.

Lord knows when this will all happen - it seems I have taken on some other stuff too...

[LostTemplar]

Map looks nice, btw what was the source information for such a map, and what was generated randomly?

[Nick]

Map looks nice, btw what was the source information for such a map, and what was generated randomly?

The basic source is the map I linked to in the Scale post. What I have done is broken it up into 66 regions. These are made up of grids representing a square mile and indicating what kind of terrain should be there; the different kinds of terrain are the colours on the working map, and I chose the terrain based on the original map, although it's still pretty rough (hence the chunkiness).

The rivers I started by expanding the map and recording square mile grids for each river - this took a while. Then I picked a random chunk within that square mile (weighted toward the centre), and joined all those up in a way that tended to straight but allowed a bit of wandering. I'm fairly hapy with how they look.

Now I need to work out which typos led to the massive canal-like features - I don't think even the dwarves went in for that scale of civil engineering.

[LostTemplar]

I am interesting, because I am trying to make good random map generator myself. I mostly made a working small scale generator, which generates a details for a large scale map. However making nicely looking large scale map without an external source is a problem.

[Avenger]

This interests me.

Ever considered doing a Kickstarter or something of the kind? The scale of this game, at least my interpretation of it from perusing the thread, would seem to suggest a need for serious devotion on the part of the developer. I check Dwarf Fortress every so often, and the kind of constant coding they are doing is what I imagined while I was reading this thread - particularly during that bit about Minecraft/DF/FAband/MMO.

I like your map, by the way. It very closely resembles the map in the Silmarillion, which presumably was the intention. Nan Dungortheb and Taur-ni-fuin ought to be fun...

[Nick]

Ever considered doing a Kickstarter or something of the kind? The scale of this game, at least my interpretation of it from perusing the thread, would seem to suggest a need for serious devotion on the part of the developer.

I think one of the things I like about being a complete amateur is that if I fail, it's not like I've taken anyone's money. If I did a Kickstarter, it wouldn't be such a recreation for me. There's also a couple of other things like already having a job, FAangband, impending Angband maintainership...

Sorry to shoot your kind suggestion down so comprehensively

I like your map, by the way. It very closely resembles the map in the Silmarillion, which presumably was the intention. Nan Dungortheb and Taur-ni-fuin ought to be fun...

That is indeed the intention. I have encoded (roughly) this map as terrain to generate, and the map was an afterthought to try to visualise where my generated rivers had landed. It should look more like Beleriand when it gets less chunky.

[Nick]

Rivers fixed and map updated, btw.

[LostTemplar]

Just a few examples, how my small scale map generator works, something similar may be used here. https://bitbucket.org/LostTemplar/dr...loads/map1.png, https://bitbucket.org/LostTemplar/dr...loads/map2.png, https://bitbucket.org/LostTemplar/dr...loads/map3.png. It can take any large scale map as an input.

[Raajaton]

Is this project still active at all? I was following the status updates for it a while back, and after recently re-reading The Silmarillion it got me thinking about it again. The idea and scale of this game is really exciting to think about, but probably a nightmare to code I imagine.

[Nick]

Is this project still active at all? I was following the status updates for it a while back, and after recently re-reading The Silmarillion it got me thinking about it again. The idea and scale of this game is really exciting to think about, but probably a nightmare to code I imagine.

Well, it's been put on hold since I took the Angband maintainer job, as has FAangband.

The thing is, though, I'm currently in the middle of a major rewrite of Angband, with the intention of cleaning up and generalising the code so that (among other things) it's much easier to make variants. So at some point I plan to redo Beleriand and FA on top of the new Angband codebase.

I mean, how hard can it be?

[AnonymousHero]

I mean, how hard can it be?

Not very, obviously.

(I keed, I keed.)