Provinsgenerering med postprocess

Sammanfattning: This bachelor's thesis is a part of a larger project carried out at Paradox Interactive. The project aims to improve a map generator for the strategy game Europa Universalis IV. This work addresses the creation and implementation of a province generator that divides a pregenerated landscape in provinces. The provinces in the game are the regions on the game map that the game mechanics are based upon. The improvements that are expected of the new province generator includes the following properties: • The provinces that are created have more logically placed boundaries that are affected by the structure of the landscape. • The program gives the user more control over how the end result should look like by letting the user set the values of input parameters. • The execution should not exceed an approximate time limit. This time limit is set by Paradox Interactive. The work began with research on the topics map creation and map division to give enough knowledge to plan the implementation of the program. The programming language that is used is Java. The implementation of the program is based on many well-known algorithms in which the most remarkable one is Fortune's algorithm which performs the main task of the provincial division of the program, the creation of Voronoi diagrams. The Voronoi diagrams are used to divide the map into regions which by using a post-process results in the creation of the provinces. Other well-known algorithms and methods used or addressed in this report include the Lloyd relaxation, Bresenham's line algorithm, Scan Line Flood Fill, Delaunay triangulation and Bowyer-Watson's algorithm. The result of this work is a Java application that can load a map file containing information of a landscape structure and create a division of provinces with provincial boundaries that depend on the structure of the landscape. The results of the provincial division may be controlled by a number of user defined parameters. The program could not be fully calibrated during the time of the project because the landscape generator was not ready in time to be able to provide a map of a generated landscape. The generated provinces can be saved as an image file on the hard disk.