• If you have a mod, tool or prefab, please use the Resources section. Click Mods at the top of the forums.

KingGen - A Random World Generator for 7 Days to Die

KingSlayerGM said:
Previews are saved inside the world folder. So you can always go there to have a look.
Click to expand...
I already knew about the previews in the folder but as you already were showing them in the program I was thinking you could tab through new ones you had just made and maybe even have a delete button there. If you saw one you had just made that you knew you would not be interested in using you could get rid of it right there and then without having to go directly to the folder to delete it. That way you only have usable maps in your folder.

 
Gamida said:
I already knew about the previews in the folder but as you already were showing them in the program I was thinking you could tab through new ones you had just made and maybe even have a delete button there. If you saw one you had just made that you knew you would not be interested in using you could get rid of it right there and then without having to go directly to the folder to delete it. That way you only have usable maps in your folder.
Click to expand...
That would be cool. But it is low priority. Thank you for the suggestion anyway. I've added it to the list.

 
scallipus said:
One thing I am wondering - from a programming design standpoint - why did you choose 16 bit grayscale as the basis for the height map image ??
It is because that is what the raw file uses or was it for some other reason?  As the colour space the game plays in is essentially 8 bit I would have thought an 8 bit map basis would be easier to work with - as a minor thing I noted when I viewed the map in game, a result for changing the colour space from 8 bit to 16 bit for me was it essentially required me to double the levels of the artwork (no easy feat when using sliders lol) compared to clamping it between 0 and 255...  the initial map test was mostly under water until I just boosted the levels - I was not really tweaking levels as simply setting a white point at one of the brightest areas and relevelling  the colour space at that.

If for program allowed for 8 bit grayscale levels it would make it a lot easier working in gimp doing level adjustments (at least from my point of view)
Click to expand...
Was your current server generated with Nitrogen?

Regarding 16-bit vs 8-bit. The game needs 16-bit. Otherwise the terrain would look blocky. This is proven by the fact that the file dtm.raw is a 16-bit file. I know that many editing software only work with 8 bits but  I can't change the game.

 
scallipus said:
as mentioned it was a very quick and dirty test map level adjustment from my 10K map artwork.  Yes a bit of tweaking would need to occcur for a playable map, the original artwork was 20K x 20k and done it 8 bit grayscale and the land mass was level balanced for 32 or 34 to 180 or something (what works well for nitrogen as far as most maps go where you end up with your land mass low level set to 1 block above the water level).

As your maps have a higher low point I just raised the levels overall and then scaled it to 4K purely for a test, the actual live map on scallisgaming.com plays very nicely by the way...

I tend to work on real world terrain maps for games as it makes it a lot more interesting IMHO

And yes the map looks bloody awesome in the preview above thanks for looking into it and fixing the bug, I will continue to test a few things during this week - including the cli config file option, how it goes on linux gui and cli, and will also test out the custom biomes option :)

Keep up the great work you are doing its absolutely a breath of fresh air so far and for your efforts I honestly thank you :)

The current live 10K map looks like this on the server



the screen shot cuts off tasmania but you get the idea based on the sheer volume of POI's

One thing I am wondering - from a programming design standpoint - why did you choose 16 bit grayscale as the basis for the height map image ??
It is because that is what the raw file uses or was it for some other reason?  As the colour space the game plays in is essentially 8 bit I would have thought an 8 bit map basis would be easier to work with - as a minor thing I noted when I viewed the map in game, a result for changing the colour space from 8 bit to 16 bit for me was it essentially required me to double the levels of the artwork (no easy feat when using sliders lol) compared to clamping it between 0 and 255...  the initial map test was mostly under water until I just boosted the levels - I was not really tweaking levels as simply setting a white point at one of the brightest areas and relevelling  the colour space at that.

If for program allowed for 8 bit grayscale levels it would make it a lot easier working in gimp doing level adjustments (at least from my point of view)
Click to expand...
You put snow in qld lol. That place don't get snow. But apart from that looks sweet as. Terrific job 

 
@scallipus and @Cpt Krunch, after your suggestion I have added 8-bit heightmap support. With the next version of KingGen you will be able to select your 8-bit heightmap and KingGen will smooth it out for you to fill the whole 16 bits. This smoothing does change the image a little, but it shouln't be a problem. You can always use a 16-bit heightmap if you want perfection.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
KingSlayerGM said:
@scallipus and @Cpt Krunch, after your suggestion I have added 8-bit heightmap support. With the next version of KingGen you will be able to select your 8-bit heightmap and KingGen will smooth it out for you to fill the whole 16 bits. This smoothing does change the image a little, but it shouln't be a problem. You can always use a 16-bit heightmap if you want perfection.
Click to expand...
Awesome man truely awesome this makes life a lot easier and as you say still allows us to use 16 bit if we want absolute control over the contouring of the map thanks a heap...

I will be testing out the custom biomes stuff in a few minutes and will follow up with some tests on linux as well as both cli for windows and for linux using the basically same config file with paths edited accordingly

@stallionsden  I remember the old QLD tourism adverts on TV - Perfect One Day, Beautiful The Next....  Consider my take on it for my map as Irradiated One Day, Snowing The next :) (look at the tip of the cape to see the radiated zone :D )

 
scallipus said:
Awesome man truely awesome this makes life a lot easier and as you say still allows us to use 16 bit if we want absolute control over the contouring of the map thanks a heap...

I will be testing out the custom biomes stuff in a few minutes and will follow up with some tests on linux as well as both cli for windows and for linux using the basically same config file with paths edited accordingly

@stallionsden  I remember the old QLD tourism adverts on TV - Perfect One Day, Beautiful The Next....  Consider my take on it for my map as Irradiated One Day, Snowing The next :) (look at the tip of the cape to see the radiated zone :D )
Click to expand...
Haha either way looks great 🙂

 
Ok in the windows gui - When using a custom BIOME map there was no preview generation error

Here is the resulting 10K map image - this was based on my existing nitrogen import.hm and all I have done is done a 6 unit level adjustment and exported it as a 16 bit grayscale image - no smoothing so chances are there will be terracing in the in game map.  The preview generated quickly in just 49 seconds and the biomes are exactly where they should be as per the custom biomes file also taken from my live server and updated to 24 bit RGB from the 8 bit indexed png file I was using.


kinggen_world8_preview.png


 
Last edited by a moderator:
scallipus said:
Ok in the windows gui - When using a custom BIOME map there was no preview generation error

Here is the resulting 10K map image - this was based on my existing nitrogen import.hm and all I have done is done a 6 unit level adjustment and exported it as a 16 bit grayscale image - no smoothing so chances are there will be terracing in the in game map.  The preview generated quickly in just 49 seconds and the biomes are exactly where they should be as per the custom biomes file also taken from my live server and updated to 24 bit RGB from the 8 bit indexed png file I was using.
Click to expand...


It looks nice. If you zoom in very close, you can see the terracing. But that will be gone with KingGen7, (or if you do your own smoothin on the file)

 
@KingSlayerGM  I generated a fresh 10K map based on the DEM models I work with and the terracing is a small artifact from that data set... overall it disappears pretty well when doing some smoothing in gimp at 20K and resampling down to 10K...   

I have setup a test server running the map King Gen has generated at scallisgaming.com... In the games launcher search scalli and the servers I run will show up, they are free to join and I only mention it here so you can check out how the map shows up on a server...


Things I have noted on this are, some roads ramp up nicely  and I have seen another that ramped up 1 block at basically 45 degrees, in the previous generation server test I did an hour ago, we had one road drop 3 - 4 blocks in height over 0 blocks in length resulting basically a 90 degree road drop on levels...

The large straight lines that appear to be an artifact for your POI placement (cities is where I really notice it)  is that there ends up being large straight sections of raised terrain at 45 or so degree angles. by straight I mean the lines that are perpendicular along the bottom floor and top floor of the terrain where you have gone from a lower level to an upper level (with your city being on the upper level),  I also notices all cities are flat and do not adjust to the terrain at all at least that is how it seems and in one case the city itself lowered a block compared to the terrain at one spot resulting in a 1 block road drop / raise over a 1 block length.

I understand that trying to smooth out terrain to place a poi is in and of itself a not so easy task and over all the way you have done things works pretty well...

One thing that might (asthetically help) is if there was some noise introduced to the slopes I mentioned above to give a more natural look to the slopes compared to how they currently look

Unfortunately tonight I did not get time to check out the linux GUI or CLI options or the windows CLI options as I got side tracked due to being excited when I saw the preview come up after adding the custom biome file and so spent more time testing the windows gui and the maps generated by setting up instances on the server.

 
The bug with road drops should be fixed already in KingGen7. For everything else that you have mentioned, pictures would go a long way to make me understand.

Cities are on a fixed level by design. Villages, on the other hand, should adapt to the terrain underneath.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484887919

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484887882

there are a couple of areas highlighting the issue, I am working on my own solution at the moment to the issue which would be a separate tool to run the DTM through after generation...

It seems for the most part all your cities share the same height on the map regardless of the surrounding area - at least on the aussie map I am working on your city foot prints in the dtm.raw file all return the same colour level it seems so the work around I am thinking about doing is a tool to add noise variations between the city level layer and the surrounding terrain it is connecting to.

 
in this picture I added some noise to a small strip along one part of the edge of the citys raised land area and then did a gaussian blur using a 10 x 10 pixel size block along the edge of the city block where the noise was place.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484913209


In this picture I turned 180 degrees and it shows your current setup for the land ramping up to the city level.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484912444 


Here is an areal picture looking down...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484913070

now this was with some very minimal noise added and it was level dampened considrably so it's not a pronounced impact but needless to say there is some roughness and variation to the ramp up, and the strip initially chosen was quite narrow as I was not sure how wide in gimp to modify the city block area as I did not want to risk making it so there would be issues for the poi itself. but needless i'll investigate this some ore and see if I can come up with either a gimp filter or even a stand alone program to identify the city areas and feather out the ramps with some noise and blur to help make it more natural feeling terrain



It might be more apparent in the map view
this is a section of the map in the desert,

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484941952


And a section I did the same as I mentioned above only I spread it out  over a little bit more of an area

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2484942140

 
Last edited by a moderator:
KingSlayerGM said:
Cities generate at y 60. So consider having you flat terrain around that level
Click to expand...
no problem I have worked out a workflow that will allow me to fix the issue I was facing with the hard ramps :)   Keep up the great work...



This is the result of the workflow change I have made for using KingGen as a map generator.

going from this
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2485007089


and taking it to this
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2485006988

 

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top