Guides

This section will walk you through the process of creating map descriptions. Map description is a data structure that holds all the information about how the final layout should look like. They are used as an input to the layout generator.

Creating map descriptions

Creating map descriptions is a 2-step process: 1) A graph of room connections is created. The graph describes how many rooms are present in the layout and which rooms are connected by doors or corridors. 2) Room shapes are assigned to graph nodes. This process is very customizable and will be explained in detail later in this section.

Using map descriptions

When we have a map description, it is easy to let the layout generator create our layouts.

Using C# api

The hardest thing is to create an instance of the layout generator. After including the MapGeneration dll, we get access to the ChainBasedGenerator class. The problem is that this class has quite a lot of generic types and even after getting the parameters right, it is not ready to be used and has to be configured.

To make things easier, there is a LayoutGeneratorFactory class with 2 static methods. Using this class, you can easily get a ready-to-be-used instance of the layout generator.

var layoutGenerator = LayoutGeneratorFactory.GetDefaultChainBasedGenerator<int>();
// var layoutGenerator = LayoutGeneratorFactory.GetChainBasedGeneratorWithCorridors<int>(/* parameters */);

And layouts are then generated like this:

var mapDescription = /* create map description */;
var layouts = layoutGenerator.Generate(mapDescription, 10); // Get 10 layouts

Note: You can look at the source code of LayoutGeneratorFactory to see what needs to be done to create an instance of ChainBasedGenerator.

Using config files

After starting the GUI project, you can easily choose the file that contains your map description and start the generator by clicking the Generate button.

Note: All config files should be created in the Resources/Maps (map descriptions) or Resources/Rooms (room shapes) folders (relative to the GUI.exe file). Map descriptions that are placed in the Resources/Maps folder will automatically appear in the GUI (Choose from existing select box). Config files with room shapes MUST be placed in the Resources/Rooms folder in order for the config parser to correctly load them.

Note: All config files from the following tutorials are already present in the Resources folder. They are prefixed with _tutorial__.