# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Dungeon/Subterranean Mapping >  donjon random dungeon generator

## drow

http://donjon.bin.sh/dungeon/




> Drow, as a suggestion for your random dungeon generator, would you consider making an option for all plain doors? Thanks!


i've added an option for Doors: standard, simple, or deathtrap.
standard allows the full set of door types.
simple allows only archways and plain doors.
deathtrap allows only locked doors, trapped doors, and secret doors.
any other generally useful sets?

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## rdanhenry

How about "sane people live here" with locked doors as well as plain doors and archways, but no nutty secret doors and especially no trapped doors (yeah, that's what you want stumbling back to you lair after a night downing some looted Dwarven ale, a trap on your door).

Also, maybe a "no doors" option, since pre-modern notions of privacy were much more limited and lazy dungeon dwellers may not want to bother with opening and closing doors, especially when they seem to help invaders (see adventurers' typical "kick open the door and surprise the monsters", "throw in the fireball and slam the door before it bursts", and "spike the door shut so we have a place to rest up before killing more things to take their stuff" tactics).

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## drow

> How about "sane people live here" with locked doors as well as plain doors and archways, but no nutty secret doors and especially no trapped doors (yeah, that's what you want stumbling back to you lair after a night downing some looted Dwarven ale, a trap on your door).


sure, but it needs a better name.   :Smile: 




> Also, maybe a "no doors" option, since pre-modern notions of privacy were much more limited and lazy dungeon dwellers may not want to bother with opening and closing doors, especially when they seem to help invaders


i've added this.  thanks!

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## Vorhees

what would be really Cool, not to do with mapping , but as i use this Generator alot in the Dungeon Motiff selection a Select "Human" , "Orc" or "Huminoid " option would be Epic

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## Juggernaut1981

Normal: Arches, Doors
Sane: Arches, Doors, Locked Doors
Paranoid: Arches, Doors, Locked Doors, Secret Doors
Gygaxian: Traps, Doors, Secret Doors, Trapped Doors, Trapped Doors, Killer Trap Doors, Instakill Trap Doors, Arches (which contain traps).

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## drow

> what would be really Cool, not to do with mapping , but as i use this Generator alot in the Dungeon Motiff selection a Select "Human" , "Orc" or "Huminoid " option would be Epic


that was in an early version, but there's just not that many monsters which fit the motif at various levels.
the giant motif works pretty well about half the time, including orcs and servant races at lower levels and humanoid giants at higher levels.
otherwise, just replace any monster result you don't like wth 2d6 orcs.   :Smile:

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## drow



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## jfrazierjr

Does it do hexes in both orientations?  I bet it will in a few hours...heh

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## drow



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## jfrazierjr

And no grid?  This is especially useful for VTT use and would work really well with the cavern generator...

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## wolph42

@drow: I've been looking for you for some time, wanting to ask a question (hint put some contact details on your website ;D).
Anyway, I've created a dungeon generator that based on excel input (or any other tab seperated values) generates a map. The map style can be completely customized. So with the same layout (that is tab seperated values input) you can create entirely different maps. I was considering doing some vbasic in excel to auto generate maps not quite unlike the ones from your donjon map generator. This is around the time when I started looking for examples and came accross you website: very very nice job!!
This made me wonder if its possible (for you) to create an text ouput of your dungeon generated maps? In this case 'walls' should be empty values and 'floor' could be 'F' (thats what I used). I've extended this quite considerably with other codes as well e.g. L for light source, S for skeleton etc. 
However just a basic text output of your generated maps with simply 'F' for floor tiles and 'D' for doors and emtpy for walls, seperated by tabs, would be awesome. 

I think this makes more sense if you have a look at my dungeon generator, so here the link:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16833

Let me know what you think of it.

@jfrazierjr: are you by any chance the same jf from Maptools that has been bitching me around for onTokenMove? (granted the bitching was mutual  :Razz: )

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## jfrazierjr

> @jfrazierjr: are you by any chance the same jf from Maptools that has been bitching me around for onTokenMove? (granted the bitching was mutual )


Nope, not at all.  I am a much nicer, gentler jfrazierjr.    :Wink:

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## drow

hi wolph!  it looks like a nifty project.  perl code for a partial implementation of the donjon random dungeon generator is available under a creative commons license, see the 'about' link at the bottom of the generator page.  if that doesn't work for you, let me know i'll see what i can do about text output.  but i'm peery about adding features which aren't clearly and widely useful.

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## wolph42

Hi drow,

Thnx for the rep. I did notice the the source code and the license. However my perl skills are none existent, moreover that would also mean that I have to setup a website of my own (which I currently haven't). I can fully understand that you don't want to add features that are not widely in use, however I saw this request as a mutual benefit. Your output will make it much easier to use my tool and my tool will enable a user to create much more interesting dungeon that are graphically more attractive. Granted the latter does concern a bit of a hassle, but once you've got the lot running, you're golden. 

So indeed I would like to ask you to consider this extra feature, maybe in conjunction with a link to the MT forum and a short description of the possibilities it grants.

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## Dustyrocket

I would cry tears of joy if There was a way to import the random maps strait into MT.

The thought of using one of your complex Gargantuan maps manually... makes me shudder. +50 to wolph42's idea

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## wolph42

> I would cry tears of joy if There was a way to import the random maps strait into MT.
> 
> The thought of using one of your complex Gargantuan maps manually... makes me shudder. +50 to wolph42's idea


Thanks for the support post and also thanks for reminding me that I forgot to emphasize an important point:
When using Maptools for this endavour, users aren't 'limited' to the use of MT with these maps. MT (*Map*tool) has the functionality to export the map as an png. Making the combo the ideal tool to create swift and cewl maps for any user!!

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## drow

okay, i'll see what i can do.  one line per row, tab separated cells, blank = fill, F = floor, D = door ?

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## wolph42

Awesomesauce!! And yes. Those are the codes. Might be useful to make a difference between a north south door and an east west door e.g. DN and DE

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## drow

from your examples, should i be using DT, DB, DL, and DR instead?
are things like secret doors and porticullises indicated differently, or do those all get lumped in as doors?

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## wolph42

That would be even better. Though I'm unsure how that will turn out. Also for different types of doors you can use different D codes but I need to check which and how exactly. I'll get back to that.

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## wolph42

ok, I've got it again. It has been a while since last I worked on this project and I noticed that the online version is 1.0 while on my pc im already at 1.3. I remember getting stuck due to an issue in MT that should be resolved by now, but haven't come round to fix the issue. 
Anyway, this is a good opportunity for me to get into the game again. 

Here's the deal. Your doors are centered in a cell, while my tool also makes use of the edge of the cell, so you don't only have a square floor but also a wall around it and thus doors inside those walls. Hence the option to put a door at the Top, Right, Bottom or Left side of the cell--> DT,DR,DL,DB. If you can implement that in your code that would be grant. 
As for different types of doors, that was what I was working on. currently you set up a list of different doors and the tool picks one at random (or just one type, in which case the whole dungeon will be filled with that). My next step was giving the option to set a doortype: e.g. D1T, D2L --> Door type 1 (e.g. portcullis) on the top side of the cell, Door type 2 (e.g. wood) on the left side. Other functions i was working on are double doors (quite a pain). 
So anticipating on that you could indeed render codes like that. In stead of numbers I think that alfa codes should also be possible (A..Z), so portcullis would then become DPT and a wooden door e.g. DWT. Note that the tool is setup in such a way that you can (nearly) completely setup object codes yourself. The only exceptions are F, D, W and L (Floor, Door, Wall and Light). These letters are reserved.

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## drow

placing the door at the edge is easy, since the generator knows which side the room is on.
so, regarding door codes, would this work?

archway = F
open, locked, and trapped doors = DT, DB, DL, DR
secret doors = DST, DSB, DSL, DSR
porticullises = DPT, DPB, DPL, DPR

that's what i've implemented for now (generate a dungeon, click on the 'Map TSV' button to download), let me know if anything needs to change.

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## wolph42

wow thats fast!!. Its currently rendering (picked the standard "medium" settings which turn out to be pretty large so that'l take about 5 to 10 minutes). I noticed that the first row and column are empty, I haven't tested that yet but i think that will render an error. Also I haven't yet implemented the door type code e.g. S and P but If i've coded it correctly they should just be ignored while rendering. I'm curious what the outcome is. If it works out I'll post the resulting image here.

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## wolph42

Ok, ran the first test. Didn't check any settings nor on donjon nor on my tool. The render time was 6 minutes and 39 seconds. The most took me to to figure out how to get the screenshot onto this website. Original size was 140mb, after photoshop I've trimmed it down to 2,5 (any clue what the max. is here??).


Now to show you the possibilities, here another render with different settings:


I checked and it seems that the empty row and column don't render any problems. So its all peaches

In all, with minimal effort you can already create some nifty maps with this!!

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## drow

wounds of zeus... the .rpmap format isn't exactly simple, is it?

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## wolph42

LOL! You've used the wrong export function. Menu --> File --> Export
Or just use ctrl+shift+s (in windows, no clue what it is on a mac or unix system)

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## drow

but if i wanted to export a map which someone else could import into their campaign and still work with, i'd want map -> export map, right?

i was curious about how difficult it would be for the random dungeon generator to just generate a maptool compatible file.  the asset structure is obvious, but the XML looks totally gnarly.  i'll leave it to you and your macros, i think.   :Smile:

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## wolph42

ah, I see. I think 'difficult' is an understatement. Though you could try exporting an empty map and see what it looks like and compare that to a simple map with a few tokens. In all I guess its not worth the effort though.

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## Dustyrocket

Drow,
 I was wondering if you could include a way to exclude hallways, and corridors or what ever, so instead of one dungeon, you have only the rooms. I want to try and your tool (in conjunction with wolph42's tool) to randomly generate cities. I made a collosal map, with small sized rooms, and it looks like a city, if you could disconnect all the rooms, into individual buildings. Another step forward would be to combine it with the city generator here for the details of the city. You could really easily make large functioning cities in maptools in under an hour. all you would need to do would be to put down tokens, and maybe dress the place up. 

This addition could also be used for making bandit camps and really any area that's not just one huge dungeon. Thanks in advance if you manage to do this.

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## drow

could, yes.  but i really have no interest in anything that specialized and trivial.
(just open a map and start plunking down random buildings, no need to code that.)

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## ltan

@Drow: Thanks!  I will now have a lot of maps useful for when I start running campaigns again!

@Wolph:  Eventually your builder will make sense to me.  I just found RPTools today and so everything is still too new for me to comprehend it all.  But, that is probably just me being super dense today...  :Razz:

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## Fenrisnorth

So is there a way to import these straight into Maptool? I'm a little clueless, and it's very late, but this is very exciting. The Donjon generator is perfect for me when I don't have something ready immediately. I can now focus on a story, and leave the nitty gritty to this thing.

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## wolph42

> So is there a way to import these straight into Maptool? I'm a little clueless, and it's very late, but this is very exciting. The Donjon generator is perfect for me when I don't have something ready immediately. I can now focus on a story, and leave the nitty gritty to this thing.


yes there is. You'll need my dungeon builder and load it in MT. Then you need to export the dungeon from the donjon website as TSV (bottom right) and load that into the 'dungeon builder' campaign (there is a button). 
Here's the link to the tool: http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic....=16833&start=0

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## Surrealistik

Adjustable corridor sizes are needed; having them all have 5 feet/1 square of width makes it too easy to trap enemies, be trapped by enemies, or bottleneck.

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## drow

some random geomorphs
http://donjon.bin.sh/dungeon/?dungeo...ress=Universal

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## anothername

Hello,

I totally love that generator. Its a great help in my various DM activities.   :Smile: 

Right now I'm DMing a small Startrek Session & found something strange (Bug?, Oversight?) when creating a list of NPC Names for the high redshirt demand and other encounters. All vulcan females start out with "T´". While its a common thing for them they do not must have that.




> Many Vulcan females have names beginning with T' (T'Pol, T'Pring, T'Pau, T'Pel, T'Pan), but not all (Valeris, Sakonna, Saavik, Selar)


http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan (close to the bottom of that page).

I hope that was the right place to post that info, have not found a PM or E-mail option.

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## Steel General

> http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan (close to the bottom of that page).
> 
> I hope that was the right place to post that info, have not found a PM or E-mail option.


You need at least 5 posts before the Private Messaging feature becomes active.

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## Surrealistik

Drow, do you plan on adding a corridor width parameter? As stated, the 1 width corridors are too easy for monsters and PCs alike to exploit.

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## drow

yeah, it's in the works.  alternatively, you could also generate a smaller dungeon and increase the scale (e.g. 20' per square instead of 10')

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## drow

> Right now I'm DMing a small Startrek Session & found something strange (Bug?, Oversight?) when creating a list of NPC Names for the high redshirt demand and other encounters. All vulcan females start out with "T´". While its a common thing for them they do not must have that.


oversight, or i accidentally deleted the second name pattern at some point.  fixed, thanks!

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## rmadams

Best...tool...ever!  Thanks for setting this up and sharing it.  I needed a quick underground are beneath the school the players are going to explore, and with your generator it came out looking really great.  Thanks!

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## wolph42

Its been a while but someone contacted me about my maptool map builder which makes use of your donjon generator. He has created a ruby script that can turn your maps into graphics maps VERY quickly, including vision blocking layers, which is the bomb! In short I'm very excited about this. 

However, he wants to take it a step further and also parse the dungeon data, traps, encounters etc. Which can also be stored into maptools. The only thing he need for that is that that data is retrievable in a consistent manner. E.g. also in some txt csv file. The question of course is: are you still interested in doing this?

to jog your memory a bit: http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic....=16833&start=0

a lot of thanks!!

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## high-marshal

Hey, I know it's been awhile but I've been using this tool combo for a long time now and just today I went to use it again and I cannot find the export buttons on donjon; d20 Random Dungeon Generator anymore. This is the only place I can think to bring this up. If there's some other way to contact drow about this let me, but I couldn't find anything on his website

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## wolph42

> Hey, I know it's been awhile but I've been using this tool combo for a long time now and just today I went to use it again and I cannot find the export buttons on donjon; d20 Random Dungeon Generator anymore. This is the only place I can think to bring this up. If there's some other way to contact drow about this let me, but I couldn't find anything on his website


I just checked but the button is still there. It's called map Tsv. 

Note that I build a map generator version two that works stand alone and also ads a vision blocking layer automatically. You can find a link to it in my signature on the maptool forum.

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## ChampionHyena

Like high-marshal, I'm here because Drow doesn't really have contact info on his site. I'm working on a Dark Heresy campaign in Roll20 and have been a heavy user of his Player Map export tool for dungeon generation. Now that button is gone (really really totally gone! Check it out! I can't even get the TSV like wolph42 can!), and it's hamstrung some of my campaign building on very short notice. Bad planning on my part, admittedly. All the same, I'm having to postpone play and I'm a bit worried I'm going to upset my players.

Does anyone know how to get in touch with Drow? Is this a bandwidth limited thing? A deliberate change? An error? Bad caching on my end?

One last oddity: high-marshal said he couldn't export on the 17th, but I was able to do exports as late as the 27th.

Any help would be very sincerely appreciated! I'm just a li'l panicky at this point.

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## Bogie

I just tried it.  The dungeon generator worked fine, I tried several different settings & all worked.  Now once the dungeon was generated there was no export button, but I just used the FireFox browser Print function and everything printed out nicely.  If you need to save it you could select print to file.

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## ChampionHyena

While this is true, I really valued the Player Map export option. It hid which doors were locked/trapped/secret, it removed the room numbering, and it spat out a JPG with nice big 50x50 pixel tiles that look great in Roll20. The on-screen ones it generates, conversely, are going to give away information to my players and have 13x13 pixel tiles that are gonna look pretty fuzzy and pixellated when stretched out to Roll20's 70x70 pixel grid.

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## wolph42

i figured it out. Its browser/device(?) related. The buttons are there on my ipad (Chrome), but not on my pc chrome nor explorer. Weird.

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## ChampionHyena

Just tried it on my iPhone (also in Chrome), and the buttons aren't present for me. Take a look.

I'm really not sure what's going on. I've checked the developer tools in Chrome and I can see where the functionality should be.

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## drow

hey hi... sorry, they're unavailable at the moment. a few people have been swamping the server lately through those functions. i don't think its anything deliberately malicious, probably just poorly-behaved browsers, etc. i hope to have the issue coded around soonish, then they'll be back.

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## ChampionHyena

Great news! Thanks for the update, and thanks as always for all of your work on the generator.

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## Basen

@Drow 

This has got to be the best dungeon generator Ive found in my dungeon searches. Im trying to write my own and yours is my inspiration!

Keep up the good work!

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## DaveInc

Oh cool, i always use this generator for quick improvised dungeons. Nice to see it here  :Smile:

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## NathanC

Just checked it out drow, it works great. Thanks for this.

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## jonkka

As I can't PM @Drow before I've posted five forum messages, I'll first write on this thread.

I am a recent returnee to the hobby and to my delight I've discovered amazing free resources around the web. One of these is donjon random generator and what an incredible resource it is, my most profound thanks for making it. As I've read through this thread, I see that you're open to ideas but have certain reluctancy to implement fan ideas.

I understand that very well but having need and some ideas for additional features I wonder what's definition for useful feature that would get accepted into development pipeline? Some of my ideas, in no particular order:
room contents and features (furniture, chests, statues, dais, curtains, pillars et al)combination of regular rooms and caverns in a same mapdifferent corridor widths (either user selectable or randomly)different types of stairs (narrow/wide, straight/spiraling etc)curved shapes in rooms/corridorsmap style that is progressive (eg. where one enters at one side and progress to opposite side via limited selection of routes)repeating at least some generator choices on results screen to facilitate tweak and regenerationdocumentation of generator choices

On top of that, I have background as a programmer so I might be able to help with the implementation (though I don't know any Perl).

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## damonjynx

Nice job drow. Really cool program for quick dungeons. I haven't read all of the posts but some random room shapes etc would be a nice addition.

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## Runninghead

I started one of these in a former life as a Flash coder. Mine looked rough and was infested with teddy bears. It's so good to see it done properly... and that it's become so popular. Nice one!

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## heruca

Hi Drow,

I'm the developer of a new map-making program called MapForge, which is currently on Kickstarter. One of the features I'll be adding to my app, thanks to an unlocked Stretch Goal, is support for random dungeon generation via your awesome Donjon generator. I've created this short video explaining exactly how this is going to work, using mockups I created in Photoshop. I just uploaded the video, but haven't announced it anywhere yet (though I plan to do so in a KS Update tomorrow). I wanted to get your feedback on this, and give the folks here at CG the first look.

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## heruca

Couldn't wait any longer, so I've gone ahead and posted an Update that includes the video.

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