How do you like the game world map (Poll)

[Brain]

Hi, players,

I am putting up this poll to give developers hints about how CapLlab players like their world simulated. Remember, currently the game map is generated using a fractal function and looks like this:

[David]

The game does show the world map if CES DLC is not enabled.

[Brain]

Oh, good to know. we should have an option to select it or a custom map. Players could come up with imported elevation grids for maps.

[David]

In CES DLC, the player can found new cities but the real world map does not support that - those are small dots representing cities and the UI and underlying data of the real world map cannot support founding new cities.

Another reason is that the CES DLC simulates a nation - there is a [Nation] page on the Information Center. That's why the cities in CES map are fictional names. But the fictional city names for CES are moddable though.

[Brain]

Makes sense. I would not reject to play on a nation scale map. If the map would be more natural, like having rives, lakes, coastlines, mountain ranges - with effects on the gameplay

[David]

If the map would be more natural, like having rives, lakes, coastlines, mountain ranges - with effects on the gameplay

That will be ideal. But not sure why that could possibly be done with the current programming code base. It sounds like a whole new level of map generation function will be required.

[Brain]

I agree, a realistic World Map algorithm or a realistic continent map require some study and a few weeks of implementation. if your devs would supply me with their function header and a short description of the parameters I might see if I can develop one. If I have something, I post a screenshot and then we can barter about how much it would be worth to you My hourly rate as a contractor is about 100$USD/h and my estimation of a continental map generator might be in the range of two working weeks.

[David]

The dev team told me that they should be able to handle the fractal map generation part. I just dug up some old CapPlus real world maps from Googling Images - see attached. So it shouldn't be difficult to do the same in CapLab.

But the reason why I stated that the world map under CES is unlikely to look realistic is because of the grid size. It is more of a game setting limitation. The world map grid has 20x15 tiles. The number of tiles are not sufficient to represent a real world map.

But increasing the grid size to something higher than 20x15 tiles will consume more memory and the tile may look too small on the world map UI. Right now, there just isn't any significant reason to increase the grid size.

Perhaps for the realistic farming DLC, there will be a purpose for the grid size to increase.

[Brain]

But increasing the grid size to something higher than 20x15 tiles will consume more memory and the tile may look too small on the world map UI. Right now, there just isn't any significant reason to increase the grid size.

Unlikely - for once only world map tiles with active cities/regions would require RAM memory, everything else is calculated on demand. Also, we should poll about how much RAM everyone has at the moment. I bet the majority has 4GB systems by now. 4GB can store in memory full 10 zoom levels of hires maps as in google maps style. (first level has 8 tiles, each next level has 4 times more than the previous, each tile is on average 2kb jpeg data => 2 * 4 to the power of 10 = 2,097,152 tiles -> 4GB tile volume). No need to keep all of them in cache.

[David]

One of the concerns is that it may increase the save game file size significantly.