islaApocalypse/Tools/Scripts
beezm ad541dfbd8 feat: timestamped generation progress + staged snapshots (biomes/towns/roads)
Two additions, both observability only — no generation, routing, weight,
terrain or mesher behaviour changes.

1. Every progress print is now prefixed with elapsed time since generation
   started, e.g. [+ 142.7s], including a line per pipeline stage and per county
   road. The per-stage split (setup / continental loop / branch / county) can
   now be read straight off the console. Two A* fix attempts have been reasoned
   from structure rather than measurement; this makes the measurement free.

2. The end-of-run PNG capture was extracted into a reusable stage capture that
   can be called at any pipeline boundary. Snapshots are now taken after
   biomes, after towns, and after roads. The draw proxy renders whatever exists
   at the time, so stages that have not run simply do not appear — and a future
   water stage will show up automatically once it populates its data.

   The existing capture path is reused unchanged: same offscreen SubViewport,
   same draw proxy, same frame-yield plus double GPU wait. Those waits are
   load-bearing, not superstition, and each staged capture honours them.

Snapshot filenames gain a stage suffix: Map_Seed_<seed>_1_biomes.png,
_2_towns.png, _3_roads.png. Nothing reads these but a human, verified.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 22:43:19 -04:00
..
MapGenerator.cs feat: timestamped generation progress + staged snapshots (biomes/towns/roads) 2026-08-05 22:43:19 -04:00
MapGenerator.cs.uid baseline: working salvaged prototype on Godot 4.7.1 (pre-F1) 2026-08-05 01:45:41 -04:00
MapGenerator.md docs: bring all READMEs current with actual code (post-sweep-10 truth pass) 2026-08-05 05:23:58 -04:00
README.md docs: bring all READMEs current with actual code (post-sweep-10 truth pass) 2026-08-05 05:23:58 -04:00

/Tools/Scripts — generation logic

C# backend for the offline developer tools. Decoupled from the live server and client.

MapGenerator.cs

Generates the entire 2D blueprint. Roughly in order:

  1. Config — reads ServerConfig.json, which sets MapSize (8192 by default) and the crater radius. The MapSize = 4096 field initialiser is a fallback that is immediately overwritten.
  2. Topography — FastNoiseLite base height plus a mountain spine, minus a squircle distance falloff, giving a guaranteed island. Noise frequency is divided by scaleFactor (MapSize / 1024f) so terrain features stay the same real-world size at any map profile.
  3. Sea level and water — temperature-driven sea level; flood fill separates true ocean from inland lakes; a mainland fill guarantees one contiguous landmass.
  4. The crater — placed along the northern coast and carved to below sea level, but only out to 80 % of its radius, which guarantees a landbridge rather than severing the island.
  5. Biomes and towns — biome zoning by height and temperature; tiered town placement (Capitol, Hubs, Villages, Outposts, POIs) filtered by slope, water proximity and spacing.
  6. Roads — see below.
  7. Export — writes the .dat blueprint, then renders the PNG snapshot.

The road network

AStarGrid2D over the whole map at one node per pixel. Mountains are made expensive rather than impassable (1 + elevation³ × 400), water and the crater are marked solid.

  • Continental loop — highway nodes sorted by radial angle and connected in a ring.
  • Mountain branch — a spur from the loop to the snow hub.
  • County roads — Prim's algorithm daisy-chains remaining towns onto the network. Villages become Rugged roads, everything else Trails.
  • Abandon protocol — a town further than 8 % of the map from the network is skipped rather than pathed to, so one unreachable outpost cannot hang generation.
  • Smoothing — every path is decimated with RamerDouglasPeucker (tolerance 4.0) then smoothed with 4 Chaikin passes.

This is the project's dominant performance problem. At 8K the grid is 67 million nodes, and the weight-setup pass touches every one before the first path is requested. The await yields between stages cannot interrupt a single engine-side GetPointPath call, so a long path still blocks. Full regenerations frequently get abandoned.

The PNG snapshot

SaveMapSnapshot() builds an offscreen SubViewport in code rather than relying on the scene's layout, because Godot's UI layout engine will otherwise crush a 4096+ render down to the editor window size. A MapDrawProxy control re-issues the _Draw() calls into that viewport — GetImage() captures only the base texture and would otherwise miss the roads and towns entirely — and the code awaits two RenderingServer.FramePostDraw signals so the GPU has actually painted before the image is read back.

Road colours on the snapshot, useful for identifying a road: red = Highway, black = Branch, dark brown = Rugged, light brown = Trail.

Outputs

MapData_Seed_<seed>.dat and Map_Seed_<seed>.png, both to user://.

Rules

  1. No magic numbers. Distances, radii and thresholds derive from MapSize or scaleFactor, so the generator behaves identically at 4K and 10K.
  2. Respect the GPU. Anything exporting visual data must await the appropriate frame signals before reading pixels back.