Sample Levels from placerooms.pl

I mentioned earlier that my first attempt at corridors didn't quite have the results I'd hoped for. One problem was that they tend to get placed at the edges of the level. That remains to be addressed. Another problem, however, was that they tended to end at the wrong places — either the corridor stopped a few tiles short of an obvious destination, or it continued a few tiles past. My next project was to address this issue, by adding a fix dead corridors stage, after all the rooms are on the map but before adding the lakes. For the first example of that in action, I'll start by showing the level as it was before the corridor fixup happened...

Notice how the corridor along the bottom edge doesn't really go anywhere, and the north-south corridor keeps going off into nowhere. Here's the same level right after the corridor fixup:

Better. Here's the finalized level:

More sample levels with fixed-up corridors follow...

Here's an interesting case. See the little closet in the southeast, on the map below? That was generated as a corridor, running six tiles east, along the south edge of that other room — quite uselessly, since there isn't anything over there for it to go to. The fixup algorithm couldn't usefully extend it, so it trimmed it back, resulting in just a closet, which seems fine: we place those on purpose anyway. Here's what that map looks like:

The big news in this batch (though not visible in the first sample) is that sufficiently large rooms can now have a section cut out of them, before they're placed onto the map. This is imperfect in several ways (not least, there are sometimes loose scraps of wall not adjacent to anything, and I need to clean that up), but it shows promise. I also implemented several bug fixes and other minor adjustments over the course of this batch.

Hmm. Incidentally, I needed to have another look at the part of the lake code that checks whether the lake makes the level untraversible. Here are a couple examples of why:

So, I made some adjustments to that part of the lake code. These results seem better in that regard:

And yes, I see another bug I need to fix in that last one. Believe it or not, that isolated section in the southeast corner was placed there by the lake code — it doesn't disrupt the traversibility of the rest of the level, but the obvious problem is, it doesn't adjoin the (traversible part of the) rest of the level. I hadn't thought to check for that. Live and learn.

Ok, so that one room might have too many traps. Let me tone down that maximum a bit.

Continued in Batch Ten

Sample Levels from placerooms.pl

Table of Contents

Batch Seven: Fixing Dead-End Corridors

Batch Eight: Cutouts and Bug Fixes

Batch Nine: Traps