This may look familiar?

[Stridor]

Except in this case none of it was done by "hand".

That's right MM can now autogenerate RBG templates!

It is still early days yet and there is much to be done, but the MM will probably turn out to be better at doing templates than even humans are!

Unlike a human, MM takes into account unit vs terrain type, elevation, ground slope, min + max platoon seperation values, inspired oxygen fraction, and optimal infantry structure stacking!

So now you can start playing on your made maps against the AI immediately after creating them.

Regards

S.

[junk2drive]

Huge leap in the history of PC. Good luck with it.

[Mobius]

Thank god. I was bored to tears making templates. I have about 13 new maps without templates that can now have them. [&o]

[rickier65]

This is excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing this in action. With what you've done with MM, making templates was the last tedious roadblock to getting good maps relatively fast!

This will save a lot of time!

Thanks!
Rick

[Mraah]

Stridor,

Very nice!

As always ... I have a request ... [;)]

If possible, can you have the values that MM uses when building the template readily available in an XML so this can be tweaked by the user?

The reason why I'm requesting this is because the current templates place all the vehicles in open/road terrain (ie, not in the woods) and this gives the AI a disadvantage because all of his/her vehicles start out in the open and if the AI is on the defensive it's really a poor setup [:(].

Thanks for your time and work,

Rob

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Mraah

Stridor,

Very nice!

As always ... I have a request ... [;)]

If possible, can you have the values that MM uses when building the template readily available in an XML so this can be tweaked by the user?

The reason why I'm requesting this is because the current templates place all the vehicles in open/road terrain (ie, not in the woods) and this gives the AI a disadvantage because all of his/her vehicles start out in the open and if the AI is on the defensive it's really a poor setup [:(].

Thanks for your time and work,

Rob

I already had that idea [:D]

At the moment all the input values are hardcoded (to what I think is reasonable), but I hope to add an xml input the following things can be tweaked

1. Probability of a particular unit appearing on a given terrain
2. Max gradient unit can start on
3. Minimum unit spacing
4. Maximum intra-platoon spacing
5. Minimum and maximum platoon sizes
6. Fit-intensity per unit / per terrain

+ probably a whole bunch of other stuff

This probably won't happen for V0.1 however

Regards

S.

[Stridor]

I have to admit it's getting better ...

[spellir74]

Stridor, Nice work.

And the second SS here addresses the two things I was going to ask:

1 Tanks on roads,
2 More Inf in woods.

So now I'm left with nothing to say.

[spellir74]

Oh I thought of something to say [8D]...

(And this is probably the hardest to do)

On most templates, guns (ATG etc) are not deployed in keeping with the terrain that is actually there.

Meaning, take the map above (which I happen to know well). The south east quad's forward tree line(covering the center trench field)would be the natural place for a "PaK front"; it is high and concealed with LOS killzones. Meanwhile a gun in the north west quad will very possible be irrelevant, since it sits behind ridgelines and summits.

It's hard for a prog to handle this.

A prog, maestro, could temporarily place a gun and create LOS rays spreading in all directions and see where /how far they go; then it makes a decision (programed) about whether that is a good overwatch gun ambush, given the guns local altitude and vista, how many killzone opportunities (compared to other local potentials), and concealment.

...Though sometimes in war guns are themselves ambushed while moving to their ordered positions. The game _could_ have those sitting ducks there too.

Waddya think?

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: Stridor

I already had that idea [:D]

At the moment all the input values are hardcoded (to what I think is reasonable), but I hope to add an xml input the following things can be tweaked

Excellent!

Now, here's another idea I bet you didn't think of [;)] ... maybe ....

In all the versions of MM, when I click on OPTIONS it comes up telling me "coming soon" ... There ya go!

When we click on OPTIONS it will display a window for TEMPLATE VALUES ... the default will be "Stridor's Recommendation" ... it can have text windows that we can input all the values you mentioned above.

You see, no need for an input/output XML (unless you want ... even to a TXT file works).

Thanks again for your time and effort ... Much appreciated.

Rob

[spellir74]

ORIGINAL: spellir74

Oh I thought of something to say [8D]...

(And this is probably the hardest to do)

On most templates, guns (ATG etc) are not deployed in keeping with the terrain that is actually there.

Meaning, take the map above (which I happen to know well). The south east quad's forward tree line(covering the center trench field)would be the natural place for a "PaK front"; it is high and concealed with LOS killzones. Meanwhile a gun in the north west quad will very possible be irrelevant, since it sits behind ridgelines and summits.

It's hard for a prog to handle this.

A prog, maestro, could temporarily place a gun and create LOS rays spreading in all directions and see where /how far they go; then it makes a decision (programed) about whether that is a good overwatch gun ambush, given the guns local altitude and vista, how many killzone opportunities (compared to other local potentials), and concealment.

...Though sometimes in war guns are themselves ambushed while moving to their ordered positions. The game _could_ have those sitting ducks there too.

Waddya think?

On further thought --and for consideration-- I wouldn't want a progg to do all the `strateegery work. Ie so long as most generated guns are within 100m of concealment, the player is good to go. This is just food-for-thought, mitigating what I said previously.

[madorosh]

I'm lost. What is it we're looking at?

[rickier65]

When you play a random game, Force placement is handled by "templates" . The forces aren't randomly placed anywhere, they are only placed in locations that someone selected for that type of force on that particular map.

These are stored in the data/templates directory. Right now they are created manually. ANd take a fair bit of work since to create them means selecting lots of different good locations for diferent kinds of units. I've done a couple of them and it took 3-6 hrs to do just one template. Which is why even when someone makes a new map, it isn't necessarily useable in random battles if they didn't also make a template fot it.

What Stridor is working on is doing this automatically within the map mapker program.

Rick

[madorosh]

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

What exactly is the status of the mapmaker program? Been a few weeks since I checked in. Last I heard there was a work around for some of the Active-X bugs but I was going to wait for the next version release to try it out.

[rickier65]

ORIGINAL: Michael Dorosh

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

What exactly is the status of the mapmaker program? Been a few weeks since I checked in. Last I heard there was a work around for some of the Active-X bugs but I was going to wait for the next version release to try it out.

I'm sure Stridor will give a better update, but I beleive the last version posted ( patched to 1.0RC2) works well. However, Stridor has added support for multi-level water (so that you could have a dam and downstream river for example and he's working on incorporating the auto-template builder. Not sure how close he is to releasing the version with those two features.

Rick