Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Filling Those Hexes

ChicagoWiz has a great post over at his blog where he references my Wilderness Alphabet and the excellent Kellri's Classic Dungeon Designer Netbook #4.

Furthermore, in the comments, Bob from Back to the Keep references a spreadsheet that he has made that automatically rolls d100 for each hex.

Being unable to resist tinkering, I took ChicagoWiz's table and I merged it with Bob's spreadsheet.  I used a vlookup to make the results of the d100 roll populate in the hex.

Here's a screenshot:


You can download the spreadsheet for OpenOffice here.  I could not get it to work in Excel and I don't know why.  Perhaps later today I'll take another crack at it.  If you know how to fix it, let me know.

Thanks a bunch to ChicagoWiz and to Bob for putting the table and the spreadsheet out there.  I just mashed them together.
at

11 comments:

  1. TreyMay 10, 2011 at 5:24 PM

    Cool. Thanks, Jim!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert MorrisMay 10, 2011 at 5:43 PM

    I'll see what I can do to make it work in Excel in a bit. Thanks for getting this together.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael S/ChgowizMay 10, 2011 at 6:57 PM

    My spreadsheet does very similar, but I'm taking it the next step to populate the hexes with the results from those tables. That's a bit harder as it's a num-of-hexes*n-number-of-following rows which Excel doesn't do so well. Thanks for hacking this up, at least I know I'm not crazy for trying.

    ReplyDelete
  4. John Matthew StaterMay 10, 2011 at 8:09 PM

    I have a ridiculously large spreadsheet for just that - I need to put it out there for community use at some point. Good on you for actually doing it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JimMay 10, 2011 at 9:01 PM

    @Everyone -- thanks for the comments. I agree with ChicagoWiz -- the next step is a bear... It might be easy to build an hlookup off the vlookup; kinda looking up on a matrix; down then over... dunno... just a thought

    ReplyDelete
  6. Michael S/ChgowizMay 11, 2011 at 6:49 AM

    @Jim - the consensus from reading various Excel/VBasic forums is that we'll have to do this via VBasic.

    You know, if your PDF didn't paste sanskrit when I do a copy, this would be much easier to create test cases. :P

    ReplyDelete
  7. Michael S/ChgowizMay 11, 2011 at 6:50 AM

    (BTW, I'm just busting your chops... I know why and it's cool. I have a prototype test case with Kellri's village/town tables anyway, just tossing it together right now.)

    ReplyDelete
  8. ChristopherMay 11, 2011 at 6:55 AM

    Very cool! Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Robert MorrisMay 11, 2011 at 2:30 PM

    I put the chart lookup into the Excel sheet. It doesn't change the colors, but it will do the lookup and populate the fields. I moved the parenthetical stuff into a third column on the table to make the sheet easier to read once generated. You can get the Excel 2007 version here and the Excel 97-2003 version here.

    As far as populating the cells with the results of subtables, the only reliable way to do it is with VB. I always ran into too many errors when I tried doing it with nested calculations in the sheet.

    ReplyDelete
  10. JimMay 11, 2011 at 7:40 PM

    @Bob -- Thanks for doing that and thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Roger G-SMay 19, 2011 at 1:21 AM

    I'm already seeing a next generation for this where you specify a dominant terrain type and it rattles off the terrain and appropriate encounters as well ...

    ReplyDelete