Re: GIS Tutorial Online

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:
> I'm not sure what Matthew (IIRC?) had in mind when he disagreed with the 
> 1 terrain type per hex image idea. Maybe we are all miscommunicating 
> what we really mean....

Just that it seems like it'll multiply terrain types unnecessarily, and
terrain types are somewhat expensive.  If I have two chunks of almost
identical desert, but they have different images, then I have to duplicate
the definition of "desert" throughout my game definition.  Even if I
define a list variable for "all desert hexes", that's only a syntactic
convenience - the actual game definition still has two separate complete
copies of the definition.  It's especially a problem because "two" in this
case is probably more like "hundreds".  I don't want to look at the help
menu that will result from having hundreds, or thousands, of defined
terrain types...  I'd much rather be able to define images per-hex instead
of per-terrain-type; that seems like it would serve the same goal and be
much nicer.

On multidimensional "binning", that's a well-studied problem and relevant
to my research, so I'd be happy to expound on the different standard
algorithms for it if people would like.  I did some of that (with just two
dimensions) in defining terrain types on the Antarctica map, as described
in the document about that which I posted on the Wiki; there, I wasn't
doing it in an automated way but just by hand, manually examining the
scatter plot and tweaking classification rules to get results I liked.

By the way, has anyone tried playing the "standard game adapted for
Antartica" module I posted?  I'd be interested to hear how people liked it
if they tried it.

> I have no problem with multiple files in an intermediate processing 
> step, but all the terrain images for a given terrain image set should be 
> kept in one file, when all is said and done. See 'stdt44x48.gif', 

It would be really nice, too, if that one file could be just the direct
image (possibly scaled to size), and then XConq smart enough to clip out
hexagonal chunks in the right places.  That would mean changing the
read-from-image code to use a hex grid corresponding to the map instead of
the current square grid, but it would mean eliminating an especially nasty
cut-and-rearrange step in creating the file.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/