Re: [DM-dev] "stepping through" crawler movement

[Henningsen <al...@gl...>]

>You mentioned using diffs earlier. Crawler movement is calcuable given their 
>positions, random seed and the current state of the grid, isn't it?

Yes, you can produce the same dungeon twice by entering the random seed
manually. There is currently no way to get an "intermediate" random seed,
say after 5 Crawler steps, but that could be done if need be. Then you could
restart the Crawler process somewhere in the middle. I just don't see the
benefit of that.

The thing I want the growth process of the dungeon to be available for is to
show a little slow movie of dungeon generation in one thread while another
thread initializes the graphics engine and everything that is needed to
actually play the game (that uses the dungeon). This would give the illusion
that the computer generates the dungeon (and keep the player interested)
while actually initialization work is being done (which normally is dead
time). For this I want to just produce one data structure that contains the
entire dungeon growth process in the smallest memory footprint. So I'd start
with the initial configuration and a set of diffs off that until finished.

I think if you can get that data structure, there's no need for stopping and
restarting the dungeon generation process, because every intermediate step
could easier be gotten from this structure. Or what would you want the
capability to run the Crawlers through k steps for?

>Of COURSE! <smack forehead!> I've never needed to save the dungeon in a 
>post-crawled state! I've been subconsciously assuming that I did! I only need 
>to save the crawler starting positions! It's been bugging the hell out of me 
>to not be able to re-load generated data, and it was because I was trying to 
>figure out how to get around the crawler trails. They're not stored, anyway!

Indeed! I think you never tried the option in the 1.0 version where you can
enter a random seed manually. The program always prints which rooms and
stats files and which random seed it used. Write those down, and make it run
again with those same data, and you get the exact same dungeon. Been there,
done that;-)

>I just found my project for tonight...

And that is???

Peter