RE: [stella] Role-Playing Game Development

Subject: RE: [stella] Role-Playing Game Development
From: Amos Bannister <arb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 16:34:42 +1000
 > From: Dan Knapp [mailto:dankna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

 > > Speaking of sacrelige - never say something can't be done 
 > on the 2600 in
 > > this list! A 256*256 grid fully populated would need 65536 
 > cells to be
 > > encoded true, but mapping that much area is going to be very
 > > time-consuming, and not worth the effort. Instead, all you 
 > would have to
 > > do is create a sparse-array of "populated" cells, and have 
 > a handful of
 > > "generic" "empty" cells which could be used for cells not in the
 > > sparse-array. You could use a simple function to map broad details
 > > (desert, water, forest, mountain, snow) and have maybe two or three
 > > generic examples of each type. When a cell is referenced 
 > that is not in
 > > the list, pick a random cell of the relevant type and use that one.

 >   Makes sense.  Also, you could if desired calculate the 
 > "random" number in
 > such a way that a given set of coordinates will always yield 
 > a given one of
 > the generic cells.  ALSO, you could have simple 
 > transformations, also applied
 > randomly or pseudorandomly, to do things like add trees and such.
 >   I retract my statement; I wasn't looking at the rules properly.

That is exactly what I was thought after I had sent my previous message.
A simple mapping function that would take the (X,Y) grid reference of a
cell and produce a number, which would the type of generic cell to use
(desert, water, etc.) and a second function to determine which instance
of that type to use (ie, Desert2, Desert3, etc). That way a person
backtracking would see the same cell entirely. If randomly adding trees
and such, the cell's co-ordinates could be the seed for a RNG, which
would again mean that someone visiting the same cell twice would see
exactly the same thing.

I personally would like to tackle such a project, but alas, work
commitments and current events in my personal life mean I will have no
time for coding or electronics outside of work. I can nearly picture the
structures needed for this project - it would be fun working out an
effective encoding scheme.

-- 
Amos Bannister
Principal Developer
Stratagem Infobase
West Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

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