ORIGINAL: Mad Russian
How does your program handle water obstacles that are not on a hexside or roads that are?
Apologies for the long answer, because I'm not sure I understand what you are asking:
The program currently assumes water obstacles run between hexes (actually, between obstacle ids in hexes), and roads run across hexes.
What the program basically does, is look at the data in .fp9 file and render that data as a map. The .fp9 file contains everything that is important for the game (and game AI) to understand the terrain.
It renders using a theme file telling it which colors to use for elevation, for roads, the type of grid (1km squares or hexes), font sizes, shading, etc. As part of map rendering, it attempts to make things easier on the eye, by straightening roads, aligning buildings with nearby roads, cutting a clearing through the forest/town if a road passes through. To do this in HexDraw may be a hassle.
The program looks beyond the .fp9 data in two cases:
- it takes additional map specific hints, adding data not included in the .fp9 file. Think of road/town labels, and information about roads and obstacles running into the "half-hexes" at the map edge. It reads those from a text file.
- it takes a look at the original bitmap to figure out through which hex side the road connections run. The .fp9 file, as I understand it, does not describe how neighboring road hexes are connected (if at all). I recently added the ability to pick up 'pink' roads from my HexDraw bitmap in order to render a 'flavor' rail-road for my map.
The program generally is not capable of recognizing artistic flavor in the game map, beyond the basic .fp9 data. It doesn't look for road bends or stream positions. Then again, the .fp9 data indicates that these flavor details are not relevant to play the game/mission nor for interpreting the terrain correctly.
The program does render the maps without the restrictions imposed by the map values editor, since there is no need to interpret the rendered bitmap again.
I'm one of the persons who picked up the Flashpoint:Germany game because of the great looking maps. By creating a program to render maps based on the .fp9 data, I'm able to play the game with maps closer to the FG style. These maps make a few other people happy as well. And I'm able create my own maps, without having to patiently arrange forest and fields textures.
William
