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Custom Maps

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 6:17 am
by Preacherman
I created a modification of the original Risk map, and it seems to work well. Thanks to last night's testers! It makes for a somewhat more balanced game, continents are not as easily defended as they were before.
For want of a better name, it is titled Risk Plus. It adds Antarctica as an additional continent worth 1 point, as well as additional routes Eastern Australia - Argentina, and two suggested by Kef, Japan - New Guinea and South Africa - Antarctica. Finally, the bonus' for each continent have been adjusted based on a suggestion by Cynet, 1 bonus point for each country needed to actually defend the continent in question, which seems logical to me.
So look out for it :wink:

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 3:09 pm
by Guest
<a href="http://www.cage8.com/Risk_Plus.luxb.sitx">Here</a> is the updated version of the above, available for download - just unstuff it and drag it to your saved boards folder. It will appear as Risk Plus in your saved games menu.

Couple of modifications - Antarctica has been split into two sides, east and west. East still links to Argentina, but west now links to Western Australia instead of South Africa. The continent is now worth 2 points instead of 1.
The Japan New Guinea route has been removed, as has east Australia Argentina...

Enjoy :)

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 5:51 pm
by Preacherman
Here is a .sitx file for the continental USA, (originally requested by Cynet). Unstuff and save the .luxb file in your Saved Boards folder, and the US folder can be dropped into your Lux.app/Contents/Resources/Themes folder.
The map is not beautiful by any means, but fully functional. Alaska and Hawaii have been sacrificed in favour of a more compact playing area.
I will try and develop this one further, as it is an interesting map to play, and will post any updates here in time...please feel free to comment, that's how improvements are made!

Meanwhile, working on Asia and South America :)

Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 9:01 pm
by Nikolas
New maps look great! Haven't tried them yet.

I notice on the Risk-Plus map there is about an inch of free space at the bottom that makes it look unbalanced.

And in the US map it is hard to see the separate "continents"----maybe my colors are set poorly for it, or maybe I just need to set my borders to be thicker----I'm assuming there are separate "continents".

Thanks for all the work----I always thought a good map would be 1946 Israel/Palestine (below is a link that shows the "states" and the percentage of population)---of course, maybe this would be a political nightmare.

http://www.passia.org/images/pal_facts_ ... s_1946.gif

tony nickles

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 7:39 am
by Preacherman
Thanks Nikolas, I know the US map is a bit difficult to make out the territories, it is my fault, not your screen! I will try and improve that.

The link above for Risk Plus has now been fixed, the free space has been removed and it all fits better on the screen now.

Meanwhile, here is Asia - still Beta, meaning nobody has played it at all yet apart from me, but technically it works, probably still needs some work on the layout though, am open for comments about the continent/links, etc to make it all more balanced.

If the interest is there, I will make a quick tutorial for the best/fastest way to build custom maps based on real locations? It is not difficult once you get into the routine, Asia for example took about 45 minutes from start to finish...

Sweet

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 12:00 pm
by Pi
I can't wait to get home from work today!

Thanks P-man! You rock!

What other maps can we look forward to?

Greater Los Angeles County? : )

Pi

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:07 pm
by dustin
Preacherman wrote:If the interest is there, I will make a quick tutorial for the best/fastest way to build custom maps based on real locations?
I would be very interested in this. I could even host it here on sillysoft (with your permission).

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:41 pm
by Preacherman
I thought you would have known how to make maps Dustin :lol:

I will try knocking something up over the weekend :)

maps

Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 7:23 am
by riz
i did my version of asia too, actually i started before preacherman post here here, so he beat me in speed. gosh! it will be nice for him to post his method. I used more than a day in making it. The part that takes most time, was to transfer all the coordinates X,Y to the luxb file. And also to check the errors.

the problem i discovered that with a map that has lots of continents inside a big piece of land, is the continent borders can't be see very clearly, after the placement of armies. So it's can be very confusing.

Image

Image

Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 7:43 am
by Guest
Wow, that looks great Riz! Our definitions of "Asia" are obviously very different, lol! I basically had Russia and then directly down to the Indian subcontinent and Vietnam. But your version looks a lot better visually than mine - so it is obviously worth spending the extra time to get the polygons right!
I am working on a tutorial right now, which should be finished later today, I hope it can help others to get started as well :)

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 8:18 am
by Preacherman
OK, one tutorial finished, and obviously a completey new map (Great Britain & Eire) to go with it :)

Dustin, I have no problem hosting it, but it'll feel closer to home hosted here I suppose - where should I email it?

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:22 pm
by dustin
You could email it to lux@sillysoft.net

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:52 pm
by Preacherman
Done 8)

Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2004 7:34 am
by Preacherman
There is a beter version of the USA here now, it uses the same (crappy) theme as before, so this is the .luxb file only, can be dropped directly into your Saved Boards folder - throw out the old united_states maps unless you happen to like them!
This new version fixes a bug in one of the adjoining tags that surprisingly nobody spotted earlier, it also combines a couple of those fiddly north-east states with their respective neighbours, thereby bringing the bonuses in that region down as well which should balance things up a little more.
Finally, it all looks a bit better, though still not perfect...

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 7:41 am
by Preacherman
Dustin, what are the chances of Lux supporting more polygon types, specifically circles?

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 10:56 am
by dustin
If Lux was ever to support a 'perfect' circle shape (i.e. specified by a center point and radius) it is very likely that Lux would just internally convert this shape to an imperfect circle made up of a series of points. Since it is now possible to just specify this series of points (at the resolution that you desire) I doubt that Lux will add support for circles.

Although if lots of people desired it then it could be added.

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 1:01 pm
by Preacherman
Well, I suppose the uses are limited - I was working on a solar system map, and got bored plotting the planets by hand is all, but I guess I'll just have to stick with it :lol:

Different map feature request

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 5:55 pm
by IdahoEv
I don't want to add a bunch of feature requests when you're plate's already full, but here are two that might be fun if they're not too difficult to implement:

* An option to tell Lux to display map regions/player colors as partially transparent, allowing some of the theme to show through. Would be cool for themed maps.

* Including the pictures on the cards as items you can customize with a theme. So space maps can have raygun cards, medieval maps can have catapult cards, etc.

Anyway, they'd be fun, though of course stability and bugfixes should always come first, so ignore me if necessary. :-)

Keep up the good work!
Ev

P.S. Another quick thought ... it would be extremely handy for map-writers if Lux printed the line it was currently on when it encountered an error while loading a map file. A print to console would be plenty.

Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 7:34 am
by Preacherman
...and whilst we have this particular can of worms open...

I know the format is in it's death throes, but .png doesn't yet support animation, so how about .gif support for the background images, and perhaps even the random smaller images that are placed on maps?

Would make for some seriously cool maps if you could have cards whizzing about, stars blinking, whatever, so on, and so forth :)

Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 12:28 pm
by dustin
I'm pretty sure that normal gifs are currently supported. Although this might not transfer over to animated gifs. Try one out and see what happens if you want.

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 4:32 am
by Preacherman
Yeah, I did try it - the image comes through, but not the animations :cry: