Hardcoded overworld

Effortless generation from an image

Overview

Back when I was planning to introduce a hardcoded wilderness in UR, I thought programming it would be a real pain in the arse. Well, things turned out easier than I had imagined. In the early stages of planning I made a series of maps in .bmp format. Since the wilderness map was supposed to be preprogrammed, the catch was to build a large array of integers representing one of these maps. Manual copying was out of question, naturally, but something had to be done.

Finally I decided to write a small program that would do the dirty job for me. The .bmp had a fixed set of colours, each one representing a given terrain type. The point is that the computer can read the bitmap pixel by pixel and decide which terrain type each pixel represents by reading that pixel's colour.

A more in-depth explanation

This is how it has been done in UR after the rewrite. First, an image has been created, with a fixed list of colours. Each colour represents one type of terrain, for instance tundra is RGB(255,255,255), swamp is RGB(0,64,64), plains are RGB(128,128,0), etc. Take a look at the image I used to see what I mean.

The colour interpreter is a program that scans the entire image pixel by pixel and assigns a terrain type to each pixel's colour, writing it in an array, to a text file or directly to a data file, or the way you like. This way, the information about the terrain in the overworld can be created in a visual way (for instance, in MS Paint) and easily transfered to a binary format.

Eye candy

UR, of course, doesn't stop here. If you have a possibility to display more than the standard 16 console colours, you may add a nice overworld map to be displayed in the game, such as this one:

The terrain information from the previous image is used, but the actual terrain colour is taken from this image. This way, the game clearly distinguishes between the terrains and at the same time has an eye pleasing graphical display. In other words, the game doesn't bind terrains to single colours, which is more natural looking and simply prettier (gameplay issues apart).