Ryandor.com

The basic idea:

A patch of ecosystem would have a more limited plant selection(right now the only two forest types are forest and swamp)
Like ecosystem 1. would have tree type b. and d. and e. plant type a. f. k. o. or or z. Simply so far right?

Secondly instead of random placement of plants so all types are spread out. These tree and plant types would clump together. Small clumps,medium clump, and big clumps but almost always clumps(trees allowed more spacing in there clumping then plants) clumps would be most dense in the middle and radiate out(though not necessarily perfectly round)

Plants would have tendencies of location. Like bullrushes would be likely placed around bodies of water. Mushrooms might be most likely to be placed by certain kinds of trees. Or things unlikely to be placed by certain other things.

Ecosystems might not even contain trees at all.
A prairie ecosystem would have a selection of tall plants and wildflowers for placement. Most crusual is few areas would use regular grass since it looks so very stupid all over the place. Instead mostly tall coarse grass.

Even perhaps pools of water generated in certain ecosystems. Like alot in swamps and some in certain kinds of forests. Pools perhaps you can even walk though. (could use the gimp of one kind of tile and make it look like water.. or something like that)

Then you could just paint the map with different color coded ecosystems and automatically have a nice detailed world people can get into.

So... am I out there or what? Anyone know of a program that can get close to doing this or able to program something like this?

About the closest thing you'll get to a "grouping" of plants is putting them together in the item script for it. For a decent example, look at the alpine.txt script. It groups pine trees in clusters or group. That I think is the closest thing you'll be able to do with Dragon.

-Ryandor

You have to bear in mind we are very limited in what we can modify and what we can't. We don't have access to the sourcecode for Dragon and Darus (the programmer of Dragon) has pretty much stopped development with it. That being said there is a lot you can do with adjusting the frequency of which items showup. The first number on any line in an items script is the "weight" of that item. It is not an exact percentage but something more like all the weights get added in and then the program draws one "out of the hat". As Ryan said you can do clumping like in the alpine script but the thing about that is that you need to have a low enough density placement in the items.txt script so that you don't have clumps overlapping clumps overlapping clumps.

If you know that say in the north part of your map you want forests to have mostly pine trees and in the southwest part of the map you want them to have coniferous and say in the southeast you want dead trees you can use the items.txt script like say:

01 0120 0000 0000 6143 2000 pineforest.txt
01 0120 0000 2001 3000 4095 conforest.txt
01 0120 3001 2001 6143 4095 deadforest.txt

This is a very simple example and of course you would have to make each of those scripts. I've commented most of the scripts that are in the mod pretty well so they are easy to use as a guide to customizing for what you want.

_________________
This space for rent.