I had created the basic paths, put nicely curved bends in them, and so on.
All of this looked good except for where the paths terminated upon entering a glade, meadow, or whatever:
all I had at the ends was solid lines; what I wanted was for these to gradually peter out.
The sections for this needed to be solid (opaque) where the main path ended
and gradually fade to nothingness (transparent) as the terrain moved away from the path.
In addition, this gradient needed to have direction to match the direction of the path where it terminated.
I made one futile attempt to do this manually in Gimp: the result looked horrible.
I decided to let Perl do it for me. Here's the result which I knocked up this afternoon.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.032;
use warnings;
use autodie ':all';
use List::Util 'shuffle';
use Path::Tiny;
die "Usage: $0 name\n" unless @ARGV == 1;
my $name = $ARGV[0];
my ($base, $size, $orient) = split /_/, $name;
my %bits_for = (s => 16, m => 32, l => 48, b => 96);
die "Unknown size '$size'" unless exists $bits_for{$size};
my $bits = $bits_for{$size};
my $matrix = create_matrix($bits);
my $oriented = orient_matrix($orient, $matrix);
my $hexes = gen_hex_values($oriented);
write_xbm($name, $hexes, $bits);
sub create_matrix {
my ($bits) = @_;
my $matrix = [];
for (0 .. $bits - 1) {
push $matrix->@*, [shuffle((0)x$_, (1)x($bits-$_))];
}
return $matrix;
}
sub orient_matrix {
my ($orient, $matrix) = @_;
my $oriented = [];
for ($orient) {
/^n$/ && do {
push $oriented->@*, $matrix->[$_] for reverse 0 .. $matrix
+->$#*;
last;
};
/^s$/ && do {
push $oriented->@*, $matrix->[$_] for 0 .. $matrix->$#*;
last;
};
/^e$/ && do {
for my $x (0 .. $matrix->$#*) {
my $col = [];
for my $y (0 .. $matrix->[$x]->$#*) {
push $col->@*, $matrix->[$y][$x];
}
push $oriented->@*, $col;
}
last;
};
/^w$/ && do {
for my $x (0 .. $matrix->$#*) {
my $col = [];
for my $y (reverse 0 .. $matrix->[$x]->$#*) {
push $col->@*, $matrix->[$y][$x];
}
push $oriented->@*, $col;
}
last;
};
die "Unknown orientation '$orient'";
}
return $oriented;
}
sub gen_hex_values {
my ($matrix) = @_;
my $vector = [];
push $vector->@*, $matrix->[$_]->@* for 0 .. $matrix->$#*;
my $hexes = [];
for (my $i = 0; $i <= $vector->$#*; $i += 8) {
push $hexes->@*, map $_ eq '00' ? '0x00' : $_,
sprintf '%#0.2x', eval '0b' . join '', $vector->@[$i .. $i
++7];
}
return $hexes;
}
sub write_xbm {
my ($name, $hexes, $size) = @_;
my $index = '0000';
my $dir = '.';
my @files;
{
opendir(my $dh, $dir);
@files = grep /^\Q$name\E_\d{4}/, readdir $dh;
closedir $dh;
}
if (@files) {
$index = (sort { $b cmp $a } map /^\Q$name\E_(\d{4})/, @files)
+[0];
++$index;
}
my $indexed_name = $name . '_' . $index;
my $xbm_file = $indexed_name . '.xbm';
my $xbm_path = path($dir, $xbm_file);
{
open my $fh, '>', $xbm_path;
$fh->say("#define ${indexed_name}_width $size");
$fh->say("#define ${indexed_name}_height $size");
$fh->say("static unsigned char ${indexed_name}_bits[] = { " .
+join(', ', $hexes->@*) . ' };');
}
return;
}
This produced the result I wanted.
It allows multiple random instances so all the path endings don't look the same.
I wouldn't claim this to be production-grade code; however, it does the required task without any sort of problems.
This was only intended to be a quickly developed tool for a specific task; it does the job and does it quickly —
I probably won't be spending any time making improvements but acknowledge that improvements could be made.
When I was doing some research into this, before I started coding, I did note that the hex elements (0xhh)
seemed to be in groups of twelve.
I was unable to find any reason for this, so I didn't implement it
— I'm certainly not going to try to discern bit patterns from such a large collection of hex values;
although, there is a preponderance of 0xff values on the opaque side, and 0x00 on the transparent side.
Here's an example of output. It is a 32x32 square.
The orientation is 'w' (west): opaque on the right; transparent on the left.
#define fade_m_w_0000_width 32
#define fade_m_w_0000_height 32
static unsigned char fade_m_w_0000_bits[] = { 0x01, 0xc8, 0x27, 0xef,
+0x20, 0x21, 0xfe, 0xdf, 0x22, 0x8f, 0x7a, 0xff, 0x00, 0x51, 0xdf, 0x7
+f, 0x02, 0xc7, 0xaf, 0xff, 0x10, 0x89, 0xaf, 0xff, 0x11, 0x22, 0x8a,
+0xff, 0x01, 0x4f, 0xe7, 0xdf, 0x02, 0x1b, 0x5f, 0xbf, 0x90, 0x8d, 0x2
+9, 0xbf, 0x04, 0x02, 0xff, 0x7f, 0x06, 0x2a, 0x7f, 0xff, 0x04, 0x45,
+0x33, 0xbf, 0x00, 0x04, 0xf1, 0x77, 0x00, 0x04, 0xf8, 0xff, 0x08, 0x7
+2, 0x97, 0xff, 0x01, 0x2c, 0xb5, 0xfb, 0x42, 0x11, 0x57, 0xb7, 0x03,
+0x24, 0x53, 0xbf, 0x05, 0x1a, 0xce, 0xcf, 0x04, 0x33, 0xdc, 0x3f, 0x0
+8, 0x02, 0x03, 0xff, 0x10, 0xac, 0xdb, 0xef, 0x48, 0xb2, 0x0f, 0x7f,
+0x29, 0x59, 0x2f, 0xf7, 0x02, 0x53, 0x7f, 0xef, 0x00, 0x5d, 0xf4, 0x7
+f, 0x00, 0x24, 0x7d, 0xdb, 0x00, 0x13, 0x2f, 0xdf, 0x09, 0x54, 0x35,
+0xfd, 0x04, 0xa9, 0xcb, 0x7f, 0x00, 0x86, 0x9c, 0xff };