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OK Trevor,

I was able to make 12 tiles that you can randomly place down to make grassy ground. This is just one of many that I will create for the random generator.

I made these tiles from a map that Steel Rat made here: http://www.rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=354. I got his permission to create these and give them to you for future versions of Maptools.

Here is a quick random map made from these tiles:


Here are the tiles that I created to make the random map:













This is just a start. I will continue to post materials for the random generator in this thread.

Let me know what you think. Remember, this is just the base layer; the next randoms layers can be trees, gravel, logs, etc.

That's a lot of greenery

Yeah, I wanted to render it a reasonable size so you could see it detailed.

Is this what you had in mind? Again, this is the first random layer (the lowest).

The next thing would be to random other objects on this grassy background. That being said, I didn't want to incorporate too many features on the grassy tiles that we couldn't get rid of after the fact.

Very basic.

It is nice to have many options for generating Random Maps. I think the most important of them all is the background. That being said, here is another grassy background the user could pick when creating their map. I created it from tiles I made from Steel Rats map here: http://www.rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q= ... itemId=351

Here is what the random map will look like:


Here are the tiles to create the map:

Here is another background random for the dirt/mud/planet encounters. Since there are a lot of lines showing the cracked mud, if you look really close you may see the seams. If anyone wishes to do better than I did with seam removal, please have at it.

I made the tiles from Steel Rats image here: http://www.rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=255&g2_imageViewsIndex=0



The tiles are located here:

As a side note, the background isn't nearly as interesting as the random elements of the stuff to put on top of it. Your time might be more optimized by working on those

as an interesting side, I have been trying to harness age of mythologie srnadom map generator, in combination with a good rnadom map script generator and the fact that aom lets you take map screenshots to create really nice random maps. I will post my results, but my script is currently, erm, busted. dunno why. time to start over.

NOTE:

I forgot to mention something. I supplied many tiles for a reason. We have two ways of approaching maps:

1. We can have many different tiles and put them down randomly.
2. We can have one tile and just tile it repeatedly.

I like the random feeling of version 1 but with complex textures, we will could see seams. With option 2, we can eliminate seams but now we will see a repeated pattern.

All of the tiles I uploaded here tile seamlessly with themselves so if you take just one of the tiles and plop them down next to each other, they will fit together perfectly as show here (9 tiles stacked together):




In the case with the Cracked Mud, you would notice a seam if you randomly tiled all of them together but it would be almost impossible to see especially if you display the final image at a lower resolution.

Here is the cracked mud with random pieces. As you can see, you can notice a slight seam but that is because of the complexity of the image (9 tiles randomly stacked together):


With the simple tiles like the grass tiles, you will not notice a seam dropping random tiles.

So in a nut shell, we have two different ways of creating random maps. We can randomly shuffle a bunch of tiles and plop them down or we can use one that produces a repeating pattern. I would hope that we could have both options. Again, if there is a user area, we could just put one tile in the folder (for repeating seamless) or put in many (for a true random map but risking seams).

Well, I thought I would start with the basics first. You know, you have to learn how to walk before you can learn how to fly.

As far as images, there are a whole bunch available on Steel Rats RPGMAPSHARE.COM website. He told me that they can be used for anything so I will go there and grab objects. That is the easy part if you ask me

Uhm if they are already on RPGMapShare wouldn´t grabbing them from there and putting them here be a bit redundant?

Ummm, that would be very redundant - you don't understand my point.

If Trevor is to experiment with a Random Map Generator, he is going to need a handful of good images to work with NOT 4000 images to search through at RPGMS.

I am simply gathering the stuff he will need to test his code with.

A thought:
How about if I create shadows that resemble terrain features that could be dropped as the next random layer? Here are a few I created as an example (they were quickly drawn out; just a rough example).

Think this could work? An example would be taking a cracked earth background and instantly being able to put craters on it all with shadow effects. Voila, you now have an astroid or mars perhaps. Shadows could also be used for little hills or holes in terrain.

Thoughts?

Examples:

That would certainly add to the variety As far as the technical aspect, all you are really doing is adding a translucent token to the background, so I there isn't any reason not to be able to do it.

I have been creating shadows that will create craters. So far I have made around 8 of them and with these we really can't lose with their placement on top of the background. Even if they overlap, it will just make the craters appear deeper.

I am happy with the end results. I will not post the overlays yet since I am still tweeking them and probably won't be posting any of the overlays until Trevor is ready for them.

Here is a quick example of taking the several crater shadows and dropping them down on the Cracked Mud background. As you can see, it transforms the background into a sci-fi or rocky place of desolace. My next attempt is to take these shadows and create a greenish overlay to them to make bodies of water like in a swap.

Tell me what you think:

That is very slick dorpond ! The neat part is that you can actually start using those immediately by creating a stamp.