I'd love some sort of program wrapper that would implement these into the server program. What would be ideal, IMO, would be a set of mixer sliders for various environmental variables that would allow you to randomly (or not-so-randomly) generate all different sorts of terrain. Trees, desert, slope, caves, grass, snow, water, mud. And so on and so forth. The combinations could be literally infinite!

A new generator, very simple:

Sinc

This generates maps that look like this. Different maps will have differently spaced "rings" and the center area might have an island or not, depending. For this map, the middle region looks like this.

The map generator is named "sinc" but it's not actually a sinc function, although it's inspired by the classic polar sinc function.

The naive version of this function would be rings coming out from the center (like the grooves on a record/CD), but I was concerned that this would tend to send people out towards the top and bottom of the map as they tried to cross it. By shifting it out of phase so the rings curve the "wrong way", I hope to encourage more people to go over/through the rings.

download here

Monsteri, this isn't meant to fulfill your lake-and-valley-in-the-middle request, it just kinda happens to work out that way.

Don't take me that bad :) This looks very exciting. Again, are there any servers using these?

could i host some of these

I guess that he meant them to be hosted ;)

hahah aok xD

Yeah, they pretty much exist to be hosted. If you check the readme, I've placed them in the public domain, meaning do absolutely anything you want with them.

I've upload an updated version of Caves based on playtest on Jukel's server. I moved the mountain faces back towards the center of the map so you can't camp the enemy spawn from it as easily (I hope; I haven't actually playtested it). Unfortunately this means the cave region is shorter, but hopefully it's better overall. I also took out the "stb caves" text on top, which was nice when connecting to the server but looked lame on the M map.

ill be hosting these over the week on my server land of the forgotten, so if your interested in them you might see them their :O
edit:im hosting caves atm and IM IN LOVE, like im actualy gonna stop working on my custom map long enough for me to play this :P

Sinc looks very pretty. I would love to see more fractal geometry based maps.
Dragon curve shaped islands, or von koch surface hills, or a sierpinsky carpet layout map.
Maybe even 3d fractals like a Menger Sponge or a 3d hilbert curve cave could be fun to play in.

Anyways, check this out if you don't already know these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension

Whats his name said he made a minecraft map importer, i'm trying to remember his name it was 203something, I think.

@matpow2

Hey, I've started working on a custom map editor in WebGL but I've run into some issues with the .vxl files. You seem to have a handle of it, could you answer some questions for me?

Now, I was trying to parse the file in Javascript, probably not the best idea, but it seems to be working some-what. What does "v" hold? Is it simply colour data or is it more than that? It's almost like the height of each column and the position of the data in the file detemines it's x and y but when I took the code and directly converted it into javascript I was getting out of bounds errors because I was getting z values far exceeding 64...

Thanks

Salbris, here's my rewrite of that loader with clearer names -- except I may have top/bottom reversed, I forget now... note that z=0 is the top of the world, not the bottom, and this confused me for a while so I thought air/solid was reversed and that may have crept into those names.

http://pastebin.com/R0VjGvZu

I'll try to get the rewrite of the format document done this weekend.

new generator:

Rainbow Towers

Seven massive rainbow-colored grecian columns dominate the landscape. Should blue try to use them as sniping points? Should green use them as starting points for building off of?

Probably not.

People can take them down with enough work, so it's probably too risky to use them. So if it's too risky to use them, of course that means they'll be unoccupied, so when you're running by one, you don't have to worry about anyone being up there sniping at you, right?

The terrain is generated symmetrically, but random placement of the towers is biased into green's territory.

(Probably this will play terribly and #1 order of business for green will be to take down all towers in camping distance of green spawn, but only time will tell.)

As always: http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap

I'd be biased about green building as well. Also, love your generator's. Are you releasing the complete source along with .cpp files?

I will release source, maybe this weekend.

i think ima start telling you my opinions on them as i host them :3
im hosting forest atm, and it looks so much nicer than caves, but i think i like caves better XD

doesanyone know where i can get the original borville from?

i hate having to post everytime, rather than just being able to edit >.>
anyways,my server was down cause i was hostin a test server for sombody, but now its up with teh fortress :P, which i like, but caves is still my favorite :P

great generators!

caves is also my favorite, even though it's not the prettiest. i think i'd like it better if it looked more natural; a slightly curved mountain, not so flat on top, a few crevices bleeding into/through it, and some smaller mountain ranges branching off east and west.

i love the natural look and feel of forest river. the combination of trees, hills, and water is a pioneer's dream come true. i wish it had higher mountain ranges, though, because the resources that come from them are needed after a map has been played for a while. i'd also like to see more trees of various sizes.

speaking of trees, i would love a jungle generator that floods the map with several different types and sizes of trees. i'm talking tons of trees everywhere, so that the map is mostly green. in addition a mix of some hills, swamps, beaches, rivers (mostly through the center), and bright green flat patches would make it ideal for me. think Vietnam.

The thing about that is, unlike vietnam, you can run around on the treetops.

But maybe that would be a good thing.

Wow, great work.
I don't really like most maps design, but whole idea is great.
Here some criticism:
-caves makes attacking too easy (easy to hide in caverns system and snipe enemy base), which makes defensive buildings kind of useless, and that lead to players spreading and generally unorganized gameplay.
-sinc looks nice, but there are no strategic points (except middle island) that could canalize gameplay. It leads to random running rather than teamplay.
-I haven't played on slope, forest or unfinished fortress, but default map shows that even small difference between green and blue lands gives huge advantage to one of the sides (greens generally own with their river). So I dislike asymmetrical maps.
-haven't played bridges nor rainbow towers, but I prefer more realistic maps

And suggestion for next mapgen - swampy river front:
man-made structures are optional, I could add them manually, but making natural-looking terrain by hand is real pain in ass.
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/8739/mapmiddleriver2.jpg
red circles: 5-10 ground height, optionally some soviet-like buildings and few trees
orange circles: 0-5 ground height, 50/50 swampy water and small islands, optionally bunker or small tower here and there and some trees
outside circles: mostly water
optionally single bridge in the middle of map from one base to another, 6 wide (4 road + 2 one-block-high-barriers), 2 thick(+barrier), with two 2x2 columns every 15 blocks

Yeah, all those gameplay issues make sense, and personally for me gameplay matters first (over realism and prettiness). However, I can only implement the things I can think of that are implementable, so I figured I'd try them out and see how they play anyway. Plus. I think the way to fix your complaint about Sinc is basically "make the map the same as AoS default", which obviously isn't very interesting.

Also I think asymmetry of some kind is important to try to keep the aspect that blue and green have reason to play differently. It has not been my experience that green owns the default maps (at least not back when rifles could damage blocks, although certainly now you get some megadefenses that seem to only ever get defeated by griefing).

I do like the much subtler way Ben's maps do it, but I'm limited by what I can come up with and most of these things don't invite subtle approaches (skybridge and rainbow towers are more subtle about it).

Regarding your swampy map:

I've been thinking about making an interactive landscape-only generator for creating terrain that's not so much for making final maps but as starting places for people making generators, which I think would help for what you're talking about. The problem is expressing features like the river in the regular AoS maps is hard to do without writing code specifically for that (so I can have a configurable river, but then somebody says "i want two rivers", or "I want the river to be stylistically different, well, they're screwed).

incase you missed it the first time, im hosting caves again on the same server
oh and rainbow columns needs MORE columns and bridges needs less bridges

also needs more cowbell

sweet generators, can I use some of them as bases for making maps in voxed?

Absolutely, you can use them for anything you want at all.

moar >:O i need moar >:O

C source code to all 7 generators

All in the public domain; do anything you want with them. (See license.txt for a more legally explicit "do anything at all".)

Each generator is a single C source file; just compile that file (they #include their common shared code so you don't need a makefile).

I built these with MSVC 6, but they should work with any Visual C. In fact, they should work on mac and linux too, except I'm not sure everything in the library file stb.h builds properly cross-platform.

I attempted to move everything into a common library and get rid of all the cut-and-pasting and duplicate code between the seven generators; in the process I changed how the terrain generation works so you won't get the same map for a given seed as the executables I released. It's also possible I introduced bugs while doing it, although I tested every generator once.

@nothings

Thank you so much, the html file about the map format is going to save me a lot of time!

really amazing work and thanks for sharing, one query though, how do i use the gens when making a server?