Simple procedural generation of “dungeon maps”

Basic proof of concept for a “cellular automata” model. No real refinement at this point.

Initial work based on this tutorial.

It takes the following flags:

• --width x: the width of the map. x must be a positive integer. See below.
• --height x: the height of the map. x must be a positive integer. See below.
• --seed x: the chance a given cell will be generated as “wall”. x must be an integer from 1-99.
• --death x: if a wall cell has fewer than this many wall cells surrounding it, it becomes empty. x must be an integer from 1-8.
• --birth x: if an empty cell has more than this many wall cells surrounding it, it becomes a wall. x must be an integer from 1-8.
• --reps x: the number of smoothing passes to take on the map. x must be a positive integer. Large values can significantly extend runtime.
• --out: save the result to an image in the maps/ directory instead of printing it to the screen.
• --color: uses random complementary colors in the saved image instead of black and white. Does nothing if not used with the --out flag.
• --chunky: makes each cell 2x2 instead of 1x1. Does nothing if not used with the --out flag.

A note on width and height

If you use --out, width and height are in pixels.

If you don’t, height is lines of text, and width is measured in chunks of two characters; “--width 40” will produce a map 80 characters wide. This is because each “wall” cell is represented by a double I character and each “empty” cell is represented by a double space; in the font the developer uses, this makes it so that if a map’s width and height are the same, the map is roughly square.

Chunky cells

Smaller maps blown up to a larger size sometimes look better than larger maps, for some reason. The --chunky flag doubles the size of each cell, which makes the raw output twice as big and slightly more attractive. Use with caution on larger image sizes.