Tutorial: Map Generator - Algorithms & Transformations

Explain algorithms, they can be found here in the map generator documentation.

Alternative checkers board

Exercise: Create this landscape.

We ended the previous part with an exercise about logical operators and set theory. The landscape shown in the figure had to be constructed, we will now see that there are alternative methods to construct such a landscape. Such an alternative is to use an algorithm. We need the checker algorithm, which creates an overlay consisting of alternating boxes of size ten. The problem we then still have is that we have a full checkers board, which we want to reduce to half its size. For this purpose we can use the attributes zoomX and zoomY to zoom out by a factor of two. All together results in the following code.

// Checker algorithm at work.
map ExampleChecker {
	mat=Gold; tex=gold;
	overlay {
		mat=Rock; tex=rock;		
		algo=checker;
		zoomX=50; zoomY=50;
	};
};

Convince yourself that this produces the same landscape as in the exercise. We encounter here a major advantage of algorithms, they reduce the amount of overlays needed drastically.