Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Cardinal]

How easy is it to pull the map data of a DF map for a classic DEM?  There's lots of GIS stuff that could be done with something like that--I've got a bit of experience with ArcGIS and creating maps, and could put together some lovely topographies using hillshades and such.

[Vicomt]

I'm waiting for the DFHack library to stabilise a bit and get the last bits of functionality I need, then I'm considering writing a map reader/drawing generator for AutoCAD. If I can get it working, I'd have no problem exporting to pretty much any format people want

[Cardinal]

DEMs and vegetation cover and political control (which can easily be changed from raster to polygon) in a standard, ArcGIS-readable format would be very cool.

[Vicomt]

I've some experience (*shudder* ArcCad) in the GIS field, so I know the base formats for most of the types of GIS info, shouldn't be difficult to write out, but I've yet to hear of anyone trying to interrogate the region map for data, as far as I know, DFHack et al all work with fortress data. Certainly worth doing if someone wants to attempt it.

[Cardinal]

I thought you were dealing with worldmaps, not fortress maps (always interesting how scale works).  Should be relatively straightforward, since it's just elevation data and an already defined layer of vegetation.  It's definitely not the killer app for DF, but it would allow for some attractive worldmaps.

[Vicomt]

nah, I've never looked at worldmaps, my interest is in the rendering of fortresses.... I've always been a castle/cave/catacomb lover. the worldmap export is an interesting idea, but not one I'd particularly want to work on.

[Shadetree]

Did a quick hack and converting the worldmap to an ascii dem is pretty easy.  Gettting the asc to dem seems nontrivial.
I'm not that familiar with DEM formats so if someone links me to some documentation I'll look at vegetation and I guess you we could use a mixture of the savagery and evil maps as a sort of political map.  That ArcGIS stuff seems out of my price range (i.e. not free) so any links to viewers/editors would help out too.

I plan on doing a lot of this stuff for fortress sites as my overall goal is to be able to grab the info from a fortress and use that information inside scripts for Fractal Mapper to create detailed maps.  But the new version is going to break all the memory stuff so I'm just playing around waiting for that to go through.

I don't think DF knows the elevations of single tiles on a fortress map until embark.  Otherwise I'd be trying to figure out how to grab those as well.

[Cardinal]

http://www.vterrain.org/Elevation/dem.html

I thought ArcView was free but it doesn't look like it.  You could pick up GRASS, which is hell for doing serious analytical work (compared to ArcGIS, but that's why it's got the price tag) but should load a DEM pretty easily.

[Cardinal]

Found it, it's ArcExplorer (I hate the way ESRI names everything, I accidentally installed a server on my laptop because one thing is called ArcView and another is called ArcInfo instead of ArcServer and ArcActuallyDoingWork...  You think the names in Dwarf Fortress are arbitrary, ha).

http://www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/index.html

[atomfullerene]

heh, all those ARC this and ARC that gives me flashbacks....

[Vicomt]

NOOOOOOooooooooooo

*Vic McAutoCAD Developer cancels read forum - too many bad memories*

Seriously yeah, some of ESRI's product names are a bit.... arcane. Just don't try looking at some of the other GIS's out there, they're even worse.

[Mordae]

Indeed the full arch of the programs is quite large.

Wonderful work. I've tried this myself, but as usually, I failed miserably.

[Cardinal]

It'd be too bad if we couldn't get the DEMs, with elevation data you can make beautiful maps using hillshades and slopes.  Heck, we can compare Toady's world creation code to actual watersheds and compare.

We could also, if we can reverse the process, use real world locations for DF--build a fortress in Machu Picchu or something.

[Rose]

We could also, if we can reverse the process, use real world locations for DF--build a fortress in Machu Picchu or something.

you can do that now, actually.

there's a tutorial for it.

only issue is that DF only imports heights at a very low res.

[Cardinal]

Where's the tutorial?  I wouldn't mind giving it a try.