2019-06-17 Text Mapper with Squares

I’ve been trying to see whether I could get Text Mapper to create a square grid instead of a hex grid. Preliminary results aren’t too bad!

Text Mapper

This is the traditional example hex map:

Hex Map

And this is the result when you feed the same text into a square grid mapper:

Square Map

It already looks like magic!

The goal I have in mind is to generate square-based Alpine maps.

Alpine maps

And maybe I could change my Megadungeon Generator wanna-be to use it as the output instead of Gridmapper. Once I have that, I can generate images using web services without relying on a browser rendering the Gridmapper Javascript code.

Megadungeon Generator

Gridmapper

OK. Alpine maps. I mean, the algorithm often uses loops over the six neighbouring directions in order to create the textual description of the map, so that surely needs fixing.

Then again, once the textual description has been generated, the code no longer cares about hexes and squares, as seen above. It just looks – different.

Let’s give it a try.

Random Alpine hex map:

Alpine Hex Map

Same data, but using squares:

Alpine Square Map

Whaaat!

It is in fact recognisable! Like some weird projection from a strange fantasy cartographer. Uncanny.

I’m not even sure I want to change anything at this point! A quick scan at this point just shows that cliffs don’t look too good (because the icon library still uses six different cliff icons).

Well, a bit more studying also reveals that some spatial relationships are disrupted, like the swamp for 0102–0201. Or the river that flows from 1204–1105 now makes a detour through the mountains of 1104.

​#RPG ​#Text Mapper

Comments

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Those pesky fantasy rivers 😝

– Ynas Midgard 2019-06-17 13:02 UTC

Ynas Midgard

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I love some of the U-turns these rivers are making. 🙄

– Alex Schroeder 2019-06-17 18:18 UTC

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I’d love to see Text Mapper with squares evolve into a tool you could map a dungeon from a text source. This would be awesome. The hex based map is one of the best campaign building tools, I’ve ever come across, particularly when combined with Hex Describe to populate the Hexes. It would be great to expand on this by having a tool to generate dungeon maps based on a square grid.

– Stephen Peto 2019-06-17 18:21 UTC

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Did you give Megadungeon a try? Reload it a few times until you get close to 100 steps and click on the last one. You’re sent to Gridmapper. Here’s an example I got after a bunch of reloads, three levels deep.

Megadungeon

Gridmapper

three levels deep

Gridmapper would make a pretty good tool for interactively making a dungeon, and *Megadungeon* could be improved as well. But unfortunately we cannot embed *Gridmapper* into *Hex Describe*. If we want to generate dungeon maps for Hex Describe, we’ll have to enable this via *Text Mapper*.

So in short: yes! This idea excites me!

Perhaps one day we’ll need a way to import *Text Mapper* maps into *Gridmapper* such that we can edit it there, and then export it back from *Gridmapper* to *Text Mapper*. That would be very cool.

– Alex Schroeder 2019-06-17 18:30 UTC

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At last, the Alpine algorithm can deal with a square grid and hopefully all the river anomalies have been resolved, now!

Rivers work, now

Next: extracting the SVG for the *Gridmapper* icons and making them available for *Text Mapper*...

– Alex Schroeder 2019-06-17 20:17 UTC