I'm having a sort of idea for skirmish mode and campaign missions, randomized yet "working" bases. The base idea is to use a grid system in which the bunker modules will be placed, these grids will pretty much have varying sizes <for various difficulties>, but rectangular. Though the issue is properly connecting the bunker modules:

Steps:
1) Place brain vault somewhere in the grid, exit cannot be adjacent to the grid's edges.
2) Set a edge part of the grid as a base entry point (multiple?).
3) Build bunker from brain vault.
-Openings must connect to each other, building branches off from each opening.
-Active square is marked as occupied once a piece has been placed.
-Focus on reaching entry points, build upwards to reach entry points, if entry point is on the same level as the active grid, use straight tunnel pieces
-All Openings aside from the entry points must be "closed".

4) Once all entry points are filled, fill unused squares with tombs.

Just a basic idea, I think I posted this idea some while back in some thread... Its not going to be pretty, but hey, a randomized base to blow up!

Neat idea, but why stop there?

Let's make a randomized mod generator. First, it takes the Coalition drop ship and recolors it randomly. Then it would produce the actors, which would all be based off the same space marine template colored with random shades of gray for the ultimate unique-every-time look. Finally, the program would generate a sparse variety of either obscure WWII era weaponry, or assorted lengths of darkly colored tubes with random pixels protruding from the sides which would shoot fancy-looking glows at a ridiculously high fire rate, even though it only takes one to kill a browncoat heavy. Of course all of the sounds, gibs, and wounds would be taken from base, and the program could even randomly create a backstory by taking the wikipedia entry for a Starcraft faction and changing all the proper nouns into.. well, anything.

So wait was my idea too far fetched?

Don't worry, Rawtoast is just being himself.
It could be possible, I think.
Remember grifs concrete generator thing in the epic moments thread?
It would probably be like that.

Yeah, he actually released the 'invisawall' regenerator a while ago, it actively regenerates the invisible wall.

No, I actually really liked the idea. I just saw a moment to by witty and took it.

If this isn't possible within Cortex Command, perhaps another program could be used to randomly generate bunkers. If a player wanted to use a randomized bunker for whatever reason, they would initiate this program before starting CC up and it would create a sizable batch of bunkers to be loaded in. For convenience, perhaps the program would automatically launch Cortex Command after it was finished.

<Dang my social skills!>

I think this was already done... Some while back. I'm gearing more for randomized bases every play, so you have a different base to conquer, rather than a pre-built base. The only real issue is there being a longer load time in CC.

I'm wondering how the grid positioning will be handled though, since it'll be pretty weird to see a concrete bunker in the sky, dunno about it being deep down though.

i dont think we can place terrainobjects yet, so you'll have to do grif's crazy draw bunker thing if you want to do this. that would be super tiring to do, unless his method can just read an object and create it (which i dont think it can).
If this was implemented into the engine i would be in some kind of euphoria.

I think he means before the match starts, guys.

Yeah I was thinking of a similar thing. Just a squiggly line of bunker modules generated each skirmish would make the game 10x as fun.

No I know what you mean. Think about it: every time you start CC up through this program, let's say 20 random bunkers are generated. When you go into skirmish, you are given one of these bunkers. When you're done with that, you get the next one, and if 20 isn't enough, then make it more than that, but the concept is still essentially the same as what you're proposing, it's just a matter of when the random bunkers are actually generated. Next time you open CC up, the 20 bunks from last time are deleted and replaced with another 20 randomly generated bunkers.

I don't know much about Lua in Cortex Command, but I'm pretty sure that it would be easier to make a program which churns out bunkers as .bmp files than to actually program random object in game, if only because of an increased variety of languages to choose from.

I'm sure you could grab one of the tile maze functions from this page and substitute paletted Cortex .bmps for it.

Grif has already done it.
He would just need to adapt it, which I admit would not be easy.
But I can say it would be much more difficult to write an external program than to write some Lua to do it in-game.

EDIT: Unless said external program has already been made and can work. I can agree that making random bases that way would be more confusing to the invader, etc. But I personally wouldn't want a lot of pre-made bunker modules cluttering up my base building list, or my hard drive.

O_o
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o_o
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o_o

Just read through that whole maze thing. Eyerape. Such wonderful, wonderful eyerape.