As stated in the last article, this time I'll be looking at what went into the MK I map generator for my eternally work-in-progress game, DeathDawn.
 
Specifically, I'll be looking at the implementation and evolution of the following components of the generator:

• City block placement. This is arguably the most important stage as it defines the overall layout of the city.
• Edge and node linking. A housekeeping stage that prepares the data structures for the road weighting stage.
• Road weighting. A city with roads which all have the same number of lanes isn't very realistic, so this stage uses an algorithm to determine the number of lanes each road should have.
• Road and building painting. With the city structure generated, all that's left is to translate it into the format used by the engine during actual gameplay.

 

You may have spotted in the forums that Dan Wilson has released the soundtrack from hit game Phaethon in MP3 format. Well, we now have the whole lot archived in downloads section!
 
Download file Phaethon_Sound_Track.zip (59803K)
 

After writing my first article about random map generators, I said I was going to write a city generator. Well now I have, and I'm here to tell you about it over the course of the next few Building the Dream articles.

Blow your own trumpet much?

Although this article could just be dismissed as me blowing my own trumpet, I'm hoping that it will serve a somewhat more useful purpose. Before, during, and after working on the map generator I've searched the Internet for examples of similar generators and failed to find any. Sure, there are odd bits and pieces - descriptions of simpler generators that have given me ideas on some techniques to use, or screenshots of sexy work-in-progress realtime generators, but no actual algorithms or code samples from generators that come close to the required complexity of my generator.
 
So hopefully this article will become a useful reference point for anyone else wanting to undertake the task of writing a city generator, whether they're targeting a grid-based world representation like mine or a vector-based one.
 
Apart from discussing the algorithms used in the generator (and why they're used) I'll also talk about the data structures that are used - so even if you're not interested in random map generators you should be able to find plenty of examples of uses for the data structures covered in the first Building the Dream article, as requested quite some time ago.
 
 

Gareth Moore wrote in to let us know that, as foretold in the forums, the "Brits Who Made the Modern World" series is a big rip-off of the book "The Backroom Boys". No, wait, that wasn't it.
 
The final episode airs on August 22nd at 7:30pm on Five. Go on, guess what it's about.
 
  12 comments in the forums

 

Well it's that time of year again. It hardly seems like a full year since we last wished all our readers a very Merry Christmas. Yet again, most of you are probably too busy downing the bottle of whatever-it-is that you found in the back of the cupboard, and stuffing yourself with mince pies to notice this post, but I'm still going to say it anyway.
 
Merry Christmas to all our readers, and we hope you have a wonderful new year - whatever you're doing and however you're celebrating.
 
Links:
Christmas (Wikipedia)
 

Hugh Robinson has contacted us to let us know that he's converted classic Acorn platformer Asylum to C, using the SDL library. With full support of original author Andy Southgate, Hugh's source code has now been released under the GPL, and is available to download from the SVN repository on the SourceForge project page.
 
Although a quick look at the source suggests to me that it's fully converted, there are still some bugs and compatability issues to sort out, so feel free to send any fixes Hugh's way if you manage to get the game running. Although the source to Asylum has been available on asylum.acornarcade.com for a few years now, this is the first known port of it to any other platform (and could potentially form the basis of a back-port to RISC OS, to produce a fully 32bit compatible version).
 

I figured it was about time for another oldschool review. This time I'll be talking about LASER, a game written by Mike Goldberg (and his cat) as part of his series of graphics programming articles in Acorn Computing magazine. The game was released on the subscription disc for the February 1994 issue of the magazine, along with a level editor so users could make their own puzzles.