Feedback on Tilemap Generator (Bachelor Thesis)

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6 comments, last by Boris The Brave 4 years, 5 months ago

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on my bachelor thesis, which is about tilemap generation using a constraint satisfaction solver. The goal was to end up with an implementation that's more general purpose (or could easily be repurposed by adding constraints), but still posesses features to offer good control over the result.

The implementation is somewhat done, one can generate tilemaps with it, I'm somewhat satisfied with it, but I can't properly judge if the implementation so far is actually of any use to a developer who might want to use a tool like this.

This is why I'm looking for developers, preferrably ones who previously worked on a tile based game at some point, preferrably with at least basic knowledge on how to use Unity, who could take a look at it and give feedback about the current state, what other features or tools might be usefull, and if it could actually be a time saver.

So is here anyone who could help me out with this? (I'll need to clean some things up and then would provide a unity package.)

Richard


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In order to have people "take a look" at your project, you need to provide a proper release (without gratuitous technical difficulties and rough corners) and even more importantly good documentation (to convince potential users that your project is worth their time, because it does something useful and it can be integrated in games and tools).

Documentation includes jaw-dropping demos, tutorials teaching typical applications and advanced techniques, reference and introductory documentation containing all important concepts and details, comparisons with other tools, and of course your thesis.

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

Lorenzo is kinda right. I released a Unity asset for doing tilemap generation using constraints too, plus documentation, tutorials and demos (ymmv on jaw dropping) and it's still hard to get anyone to pay attention.

I'd recommend trying https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/, I got a much friendlier reception there than elsewhere.

Somehow I managed not to recognize the responses over here, I'm sorry for that. (And I was lately a bit busy with the thesis itself.)

I didn't include a Unity package right in the first post because I still had to do some stuff regarding the implementation. A download can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tzzcxas0fzd6vdu/PatchTilemapGenerator_v0-1-0.unitypackage?dl=1

@Boris The Brave: Thank you for the hint, I'll check it out.

Some more explaining words: It's not my goal to develop an assets others can later on by in the Unity asset store. (Quite contriary, I'm thinking about releasing all source code on Github under an open license later on.)
A simple documentation (readme file) is contained in the Unity package, which should cover everything you need to use it.

@Boris The Brave: If I'm not mistaken, you "just" use Wave Function Collapse with maybe one or two adjustments, right? In my case, I did a bit more stuff (Patches of tiles, local restrictions) that's not covered by WFC.

My Unity addon is deliberately bare bones as it's more important to make something easy to use than feature complete. It does support big tiles which i consider pretty neat.

But the underlying library (open-source) can do quite a bit more. It supports Non-local constraints including user defined ones, which sounds similar to what you are doing?

I downloaded your package, and read the readme and poked through the asset, but beyond that point I got bored. You are making this way hard for anyone interested. Developers are lazy, as a rule, and this is too much work.

1) Provide sample scene, with everything ready to go

2) Link readme and a few screenshots so people can tell what they are getting before downloading. Otherwise why should i invest time in an unknown.

In general, it seems very complicated, so it's going to be a hard sell without more of a demo or tutorial. I have no idea what "Transparent for Neighbour" does or how it knows which tiles can be placed next to each other.

The variable sized patches is pretty neat though. I'm unclear if they can actually be placed in an overlapping fasion (as the name patch implies), or if they are just chunks of tiles all placed at once.

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