Creating maps with mGen

The good old mGen is a program that is capable of automatically generating landscapes for Morrowind.
It's not Tesannwynn nor Yacobi's mesh generator. For those who haven't tried it out yet, you can find mGen here:
http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?p=modding_data/utils
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/mGen_01.jpg

But be warned. mGen never made it past the Alpha-stage. And thus it is unstable and full of bugs.
Nevertheless, I got curious to try it out again. Because landscapes generated by mGen are said to look like crap (and this true) I saw a challenge here:
Defining Rulesets for mGen that produce the best-possible results.


After playing around for a few hours, this landscape resulted that I will call "Gray Savanna".
The following pics are taken in the CS. Everything you see is 100% generated by mGen.
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Gray_Savanna_01.jpg
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Gray_Savanna_02.jpg
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Gray_Savanna_03.jpg
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Gray_Savanna_04.jpg
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Gray_Savanna_05.jpg


Now I dream about a cooperation of modders where we can share our best mGen-Rulesets so we'll finally have a collection of rulesets that anybody can use to create his/her own landmasses.
So, as said, I hope I will find people who are prepared to share their custom-rulesets in this thread.



I will start with the rules for the Gray Savanna-Landscape:












The rules are stored in the rules.xml that is found in the mGen-directory.
Make sure to place new rules right before
at the end of the file.

You will notice that only vanilla-objects are availible for the land-generation. Those are defined in the Object.xml
So if someone likes to make new object-entries so modder resources can be used in mGen, he/she's also invited to contribute the respective XML-entries.




The user manual for mGen is included in the download.

The height maps for Mgen are made with Terragen ( http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/win/index.shtml ).
For a map of 5*5 cells you may want to set the map size in Terragen to about 500m*500m.
The height range within Terragen should be approximately 10 times the heightrange you aim to have in the game. Eg. if you want a height range from 15m - 50m in your map, you'll need to set the height range of the Terragen-map to 15m - 500m.
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/Terragen.jpg


There are a number occasions where mGen inevitably crashes that should be known and avoided:

-Areas that have a rule applied that adds objects to the landscape must not touch or cross the border of the map displayed in mGen. Otherwise the program will crash when you try to export the map. Areas that only add textures can stretch further than that without a problem.
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g23/Worsas/mGen_02.jpg

-If you add an area within Mgen, you should keep the mouse pressed for a second before you start dragging.

Are we required to make XML rule files? Or is there an automated way to do that?

All rules are stored in the rule.xml. In order to share your rules, you need to copy the respective sections from the rule.xml.
The rules of others that you want to use you need to insert at the end of the same file before the .

Edit: You can do this with Notepad eg.

Hm.. I've got a map imported from Terragen, and I've assigned a texture only rule to the whole thing. However, mGen crashes when I try to export the map. Ehh?

Also, I can't get the rules to show up in the property window, and reloading the file makes the rules disappear.

Not exactly on topic, but are there any terrain generators other than this? Any of the people who've made these release source code.
I wanna learn more about the morrowind datafiles (learning programming and wanna make my own random generators for morrowind)

ST

Not sure if this would be a good learning-to-program thing.

How exactly have you done it? If you have a rule that adds statics assigned to an area that crosses the border of the map, then it usually crashes.
But, as you describe it, it sounds as if there is only one region with one rule that adds a texture?


The first thing is the same for me. A bit unfortune probably but at least youll know that there is a rule applied when the area turns red.
The second problems is unknown to me yet. Did you save a lay-file and load it afterwards? This works fine for me. :S


Tesannwyn and Yacoby's mesh-generator. The first one generating the mere landscape, the second one adding objects following pre-defined rules.

But, please, let's stay with buggy mGen for this thread.