Merchantman is going to be a trading/exploration game set against the sweep of 19th Century history, so the map has to be a reasonably accurate depiction of the world at the time, both in terms of commercial opportunity and the geo-political dynamics of the time. Consequently I need quite a bit of base data in each map square and it has to be placed according to how it was.
The player will be able to explore the world and build settlements and plantations/mines/farms/ranches anywhere they want based on commercial and political viability. When a settlement is built, a load of extra data will be extrapolated on the fly from map square data.
French-owned copper-rich mountainous desert squares which may fall to Bedouin tribesmen in 1839 aren't exactly generic but however many there are they'll all be stored in the same 10-12 bytes, which'll make them about as generic as they can be. The same goes for the vast jungles of South America, the remote mountain regions of the Himalayas and the huge arboreal forests of Northern Europe, Canada and Russia. By 'compiling' the map into a table compressed file/bank all combinations of cell data will become generic.
It's a massive project but if approached right there's no reason why it shouldn't be doable and manageable. I've already got a lot of the main systems coded including a tight and flexible economic system and a system to determine NPC behaviour and more design notes and pseudocode than you can shake a stick at. The map has been a sticking point for a while.
Hopefully this answers your questions Rex, and maybe work up a bit of interest among people who like Merchant Prince/Machiavelli and Civ type games.
The player will be able to explore the world and build settlements and plantations/mines/farms/ranches anywhere they want based on commercial and political viability. When a settlement is built, a load of extra data will be extrapolated on the fly from map square data.
French-owned copper-rich mountainous desert squares which may fall to Bedouin tribesmen in 1839 aren't exactly generic but however many there are they'll all be stored in the same 10-12 bytes, which'll make them about as generic as they can be. The same goes for the vast jungles of South America, the remote mountain regions of the Himalayas and the huge arboreal forests of Northern Europe, Canada and Russia. By 'compiling' the map into a table compressed file/bank all combinations of cell data will become generic.
It's a massive project but if approached right there's no reason why it shouldn't be doable and manageable. I've already got a lot of the main systems coded including a tight and flexible economic system and a system to determine NPC behaviour and more design notes and pseudocode than you can shake a stick at. The map has been a sticking point for a while.
Hopefully this answers your questions Rex, and maybe work up a bit of interest among people who like Merchant Prince/Machiavelli and Civ type games.