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[lastofthelight]

Whats the best way to mess with PerfectWorld to get a volcano next to an ocean? Not a flat volcano, but an elevated one.

[cephalo]

Whats the best way to mess with PerfectWorld to get a volcano next to an ocean? Not a flat volcano, but an elevated one.

Adjust the cusps on the volcanism map to the coast line. Flat or raised is hard to control though. It seems to change from version to version how much volcanos lift the surrounding area.

[lastofthelight]

Cusps?

[cephalo]

Cusps?

Yeah, two sliders you can use to adjust the most likely altitude for the volcansim. It probably makes more sense if you try it.

[Dienes]

I'm rather new to DF but I am already a huge fan of perfectworldDF. I've been having a blast trying out different kinds of worlds that would be near impossible to get normally and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. Thanks a ton for a program that helps make DF even better.

Ok, I am thinking about eliminating the functionality that adjusts your world gen parameters when you change the map size. (the green boxes) It works ok when you resize the map once, but rounding errors very quickly accumulate if you resize 4 or 5 times, possibly increasing the chance that unintended values end up on the output. I think it complicates the process for little benefit. If nobody objects, I would like to take that out for the next version.

I haven't used the resizing feature but if you want to preserve it here is an idea.  It would be more work but one solution would be to associate the values with the map size selected when they are entered. Then when the map is resized calculate the new value based on the value and map size as originally entered, not the most previous calculation. This way rounding errors would be thrown out rather than building up.

Also as a feature request I would like perfectworld to either directly copy unknown world tokens from an imported param set to your output. Or preferably have an additional tab where it would list them and let you edit them manually as plain text. This wouldn't be as nice as having actual support for new tokens but it reduce the burden on you to get out updates for minor changes. And maybe include a blurb with a disclaimer that they are not recognized by perfectwolrdDF and a link to the wiki world token page as a possible resource.

Again thanks a bunch and keep up the good work.

[cephalo]

Also as a feature request I would like perfectworld to either directly copy unknown world tokens from an imported param set to your output. Or preferably have an additional tab where it would list them and let you edit them manually as plain text. This wouldn't be as nice as having actual support for new tokens but it reduce the burden on you to get out updates for minor changes. And maybe include a blurb with a disclaimer that they are not recognized by perfectwolrdDF and a link to the wiki world token page as a possible resource.

Again thanks a bunch and keep up the good work.

My XML system for the easy adding of tags is working well so far. It will even tell you the line number of any errors you make in the XML file. It creates all the form controls at runtime from the XML, and you can also specify tooltip help for each control, so new people can know exactly what each tag does. Hopefully this compatibility issue will go away next version.

[lastofthelight]

I found the elevation/cusp sliders you were referring to. It is obvious when you look at it. Question though -  what are the dots on the volcanism map? The volcanoes? I tried drawing those in, but all I could do was smooth the dots out. Nor could I move them by any means I could devise.

I generated a huge world using the rules you mentioned for the igneous/volcano rules, and one thing I noticed was that it seems almost hardcoded for volcanoes to avoid water; even on islands they just seem to generate a lot of land around them and avoid anything other then brooks like the plague.

[Befenismor]

This tool gives me a headache. Worldgen never freaking works. AGH!

[cephalo]

I found the elevation/cusp sliders you were referring to. It is obvious when you look at it. Question though -  what are the dots on the volcanism map? The volcanoes? I tried drawing those in, but all I could do was smooth the dots out. Nor could I move them by any means I could devise.

I generated a huge world using the rules you mentioned for the igneous/volcano rules, and one thing I noticed was that it seems almost hardcoded for volcanoes to avoid water; even on islands they just seem to generate a lot of land around them and avoid anything other then brooks like the plague.

Red = max volcanism, and this is where volcanos are allowed to appear. There's no way to control the exact placement of volcanos, unless you have very few red squares and specify lots of volcanos. The 'min volcano' number in the DF map parameters is actually an exact number. You can set this to a max of 200. Volcanos do push up land a bit, so you might not be able to get a coastal volcano in a 3x3, you may need a large embark.

This tool gives me a headache. Worldgen never freaking works. AGH!

I'll need alot more info before I can help you with that.

[cephalo]

Ok, progress report. I have now finished the new XML parameter system and added all the current tags to the XML. Everything works perfectly.

Next I'll start work on adding a temperature map. This is not going to be easy. Temperature is one area that can affect the game in highly unpleasant, insidious ways that are not immediately obvious. That is why I have avoided it until now. Hopefully, I can do this in a way that won't cause all kinds of confusion and complaint. DF fans are usually fairly computer savvy, but any temperature problems are going to be complicated and difficult to explain. I need to do some research on this before I do anything so it will take time.

[negorath]

Glad to hear a new version is being worked on Perfect World is probably my most used utility next to Dwarf Therapist.

[cephalo]

Ok, I've learned some interesting things today:

The temperature when embarking is capped at 10072 U. So even if you set the temperature way up, your dwarves won't melt.
 
When you import a temperature map, altitudes are automatically cooled as they get higher.

The gradient used to make a north/south pole is not linear. The closest thing I could find to counteract this was an arccosine function (kind of like a sideways cosine function) but this is not exact. The curve is a bit steeper than that. It might be a bezier curve.

The game really doesn't allow you to control temperature with the map import functionality. I'm really not very enthusiastic about doing this much work and then ending up with no control in any case. I can't think of anything useful to accomplish by importing a custom temperature map that is not better handled through the normal world_gen.txt channels. It will take a week of my free time to hook up all the controls and saving their settings and all. I think I'll skip it this time. If Tarn ever allows us to control temperature completely I'll revisit this, but right now I'd just be spinning my wheels.

Next week I'm going to focus on some other requests.

[cephalo]

Ok, I'm starting to get really busy with other projects and upcoming family vacations and such, so I've decided to release what I have, and also fix any bugs that you guys find. I'll have to handle the other requests later.

Version 1.5 is up!

Now any XML savvy people can add worldgen tags for future versions of DF. It's hard to predict the future, but this system should be able to handle any new tags that come up unless Toady radically changes his previous tag patterns. See the ParamSchema.xsd file in the download to see how the system works.

EDIT: Also, I am entering the world of Visual C# 2010 express, so this is now running on .NET framework 4.0. I hope that doesn't cause too many problems for people.

[Dienes]

Very cool. This looks like it should be able to handle most worldgen changes toady is likely to implement without us having to pester you for a new release.

One bug I noticed is the XML checker at the start will toss an error on opening tags but will die silently on closing tags. For example     <ategory>Title</category> will give the expected error and line number but  <category>Title</ategory> will just silently terminate the process.

[cephalo]

One bug I noticed is the XML checker at the start will toss an error on opening tags but will die silently on closing tags. For example     <ategory>Title</category> will give the expected error and line number but  <category>Title</ategory> will just silently terminate the process.

Dang. Yeah this is because the first one is a validation error according to the schema, while the end tag error is technically a not "well-formed" xml file, and I'm only handling the first case. The .NET validator appears to be more specific in that regard than I thought.