GuideGridTool - Converting between guide grids and images

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The GoldFish
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Re: GuideGridTool - Converting between guide grids and image

Postby The GoldFish » Mon Jul 06, 2009 5:09 am

jelco wrote:Will there ever be a map-to-image feature? Honestly I doubt it given the total lack of use of such a feature but if I get bored enough I may just try to write it. Pretty complicated though when you get multiple overlapping tiles with different maxheights and everything...

Jelco


Oh man that sounds so hard ;-;

Seriously though, if you don't know off hand which grid guide you want, it would be nice for it to just simply be able to iterate through a map and produce an image for each grid guide, and that's all, not do anything special, and just number the images as they come out of the file; tells you everything you need to know. Maybe not call it map to image, but, just dumping all the guides out could be helpful rather than doing each one by hand.

As an aside, I've been using pngs exclusively while using your app, which I have been helping you test, and have not noticed any problems at all, the only barrier to progress was that I have apparently been using interlaced pngs in general for a very long time, which PIL doesn't support at all.

As a further aside, I would like to endorse this handy little app. I'm probably never going to use "-image to map", the supposed core feature of this, because I can't imagine memorising the offsets and scales of how I want to inject it into the map, I just want it IN the map, to the end that I'll probably make a grid guide in the level and paste a grid string in myself, rather than use this feature. Thinking about it, it would be nice to be able to inject it into a map with some default values, so you can just use the map editor to sort it out later without having to first create a shell guide. The objective there is to just get it into the map so you can edit it yourself.

But anyway the reason I endorse it is that editing grid guides, especially to be complicated, such as long chained ramps, can take hours to get perfect, and are easy to ruin by accident. You can use this app to very easily do a lot of things that you simply would spend an eternity doing otherwise.
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Postby nihilesthetics2 » Mon Jul 06, 2009 6:00 pm

I love it when people post up cool little utilities like this. Well done.

Anyway, I remember the largest map size was 127*127.

Edit: I dont own Multiwinia, but I would love to know if it could go higher than 127*127 (I know, I know I'm sad that way). Anybody want to test and post up the results ? The reason this was the limit in Darwinia was because of the maximum file size of 65K, but they might have changed this.
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Postby NeatNit » Mon Jul 06, 2009 7:32 pm

Multiwinia's level editor isn't released yet.


As for the real max resolution, I have no idea, but I prefer to believe the OP saying it's 31x31. No reason, just that he's way more active on the forum and I believe him more :P
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Postby NeatNit » Mon Jul 06, 2009 8:09 pm

jelco wrote:
  • blabla
  • blabla
what's with the extra [*] in the middle?
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Postby Phelanpt » Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:08 pm

Oh, that one is the best, you can use it to [NDA] your [NDA] as much as you want! :P
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Postby nihilesthetics2 » Tue Jul 07, 2009 4:24 pm

jelco wrote:My advice though: stick with resolutions 5 or lower.


Agreed - the lower the requirements for your mod, the more people will potentially play it. Sometimes, however, you just want to push a thing to see how far it will go before it breaks :)

jelco wrote:"Text file contains line with more than 65536 characters"


Interesting - it says the line is bigger than 65K, not the file like I thought it was with Darwinia. Perhaps multiwinia is different after all. If it is a line limit you could have several tiles of 127*127. I wonder how many 127*127 tiles you could get on there before ... oh, there I go again.
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Postby briceman2 » Thu Jul 09, 2009 2:50 am

nihilesthetics2 wrote:Interesting - it says the line is bigger than 65K, not the file like I thought it was with Darwinia. Perhaps multiwinia is different after all. If it is a line limit you could have several tiles of 127*127. I wonder how many 127*127 tiles you could get on there before ... oh, there I go again.


Line length limits are courtesy of the OS. Even Linux imposes limits based on line buffer sizes which are hardcoded at kernel compile time (IIRC).

The max .map or .mission file size = unlimited. Just recall that you can save game with tens of thousands of units on fast fast machines. I have used a perl script to map images into grid guides in the past. It's easy to use 16 or 64 level 7 grids in a single map file. Although I agree that using a lot of well-placed level 5 grids is a better solution than a few level 7 grids. ***BUT*** there is a hitch (as always)... it is often very difficult to get gridded tiles to abutt each other without some kind of artifacts. So if you want to create a smooth mega-terrain it is sometimes better to go with one level 7 grid instead of 16 level 5 grid tiles in a "grid". The edge artifacts are very sensitive to the absolute coords of the grid tiles IIRC. You can use the map's cell size (can't remember the real term) to calculate the "natural" boundaries of tiles -- but can't recall the exact formula right now.

Under the linux version of Darwinia I've never experienced any slowdowns when using very complex map files, including multiple level 7 grids. This may be a Windows OS thing when handling ultra-long text lines??

-brice
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Postby nihilesthetics2 » Fri Jul 10, 2009 2:29 pm

briceman2 wrote:Line length limits are courtesy of the OS. Even Linux imposes limits based on line buffer sizes which are hardcoded at kernel compile time (IIRC).


I dont get it. A file is just a big lump of bytes, some of which just happen to be newline or carriage return characters. I cant see how the OS could limit our ability to treat any number of bytes as something that we can arbitrarily define as a 'line'. I could see the compiler of even the libraries/code itself being the limit here, but not the OS. But then Im not really a programmer - so you probably outrank me on this one :P

briceman2 wrote:Under the linux version of Darwinia I've never experienced any slowdowns when using very complex map files, including multiple level 7 grids


I got (noticeable) lag with a single level 7 grid on Windows - Mark one up to Linux :)
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Postby NeatNit » Sun Aug 16, 2009 12:36 pm

jelco wrote:0.2.1(r) is up.
(r)?
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Postby elexis » Sun Aug 16, 2009 1:26 pm

NeatNit wrote:
jelco wrote:0.2.1(r) is up.
(r)?


You didn't see that
>_>
<_<
>_>

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