Is this concept still being worked on?
I've been working on my own scenario/heightmap for my home state of Maryland for Open TTD, and one of the problems is that placing everything by hand intelligently is so frustrating/tedious.
May I offer a few suggestions for enhanced heightmaps?
Could it be possible to design a sort of
semi-intelligent auto-generation system for towns and industries so that things are placed according to some rules you define?
You could have a Industry Layer which is Industry.png -- see the attached mockup.
- Industry-Heightmap_Mockup.png (156.41 KiB) Viewed 4264 times
In the mockup, you can see a brown and green area, along with a light blue and dark blue area.
I could define that brown area with the following pseudocode:
{
R: Brown Code
G: Brown Code
B: Brown Code
Iron_Mine, 95
Ore_Mine, 95
Lime_Pit, 95
Farm, 10
}
Basically in the brown area, randomly generate a whole bunch of mines and earth resource extraction industries, leavened with a small amount of mountain farms.
Then I repeat the same pseudocode for the green area, except reversing the random generated coverage; with the majority of industries being generated being farms, with a few resource extraction industries.
Light blue area is basically fishing grounds and dredging sites; while the dark blue area is fishing grounds and oil rigs.
Basically, something to represent the fact that specific industry types tend to cluster in specific areas -- you're not going to find a coal mine for example in Maryland's Eastern Shore, but you will in Western Maryland.
Also, it'd be nice if we could get town generation tied into industry generation as well -- hand place a couple of major centers of industry in the town.txt file like posited on the wiki:
Code: Select all
[town1]
name=Baltimore
posx=Whatever
posy=Whatever
buildings=32
city=true
layout=random
steel_mills=lots
glass_mills=lots
So that our 'core' industry centers get generated with a lot of factories around them to consume goods.
Then we move on to generating the smaller towns according to some basic rules:
Suburb Towns: Basically, these are near/around the aformentioned 'core' industry centers we placed by hand at x/y points. They feed population into the centers and have smaller industries.
Resource Towns: Just what it means. Somewhere, John Guggers finds a particularly rich ore vein, and he forms the Guggers Mining Company to exploit it; and because he's the richest guy around, he becomes the Postmaster, and thus we have the formation of Guggersville.
Industry Towns: Generally, how these got started was that someone saw that there was a resource nearby that was worth adding value to; like for example in farm country, someone saw there was a market for milled flour or corn, and so built a mill along a stream. Development then concentrated around the mill.
You can do this presently by hand with the FIRS Industry Replacement set by placing a Fishing Ground, then a Fishing Harbor and small town next to it to represent that organic growth...but it becomes very tedious to do this on anything but a smaller map -- automating this process would be nice.
Sorry if I went on for a little too long. Maybe my ideas can be of use.
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