[Freeciv] map fairness test

[Horn Gábor <Horn.Gabor@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I often hear (and say:) after games on pubserver that "a better map
generator would be very good". As a first step i think we need to find a
way to automatically measure/judge islands. It's not an easy task even
for humans, there're many aspects of this (now i only talk about gen2, 
and similar maps, others would be even more complicated and they aren't
in my focus now). A short list of things should be measured:

1, terrain/specials in 3-4 tiles from starting "round" (dispersion)
2, summarized and weighted (due to distance from starting pos) amount of
food/prod/trade for the main island
3, quality of starting position within the island
4, distance and "quality" of expansion islands in explorer sight
5, distance and "quality" of expansion islands in trireme sight
6, distance and "quality" of expansion islands in "close" distance
(weighted due to distance)
7, global "landmass", long term expansion possibilties
8, other parameters like sci bonus at start, inner lakes, shortcut
possibilities, etc...

To start somewhere, i try to make a PHP page with which we, the players
can find a good algorithm for this judging of islands (sorry i can
develop much faster in PHP than C, and it's easier to publish w/ it for
the time we try to find the proper algorithm). Then hopefully we can
give clear algorithm for the devs, so it might be implemented. It would
be  a bless!

i started to write the page, here u can see it:

http://pubserver.freeciv.org/~hirisov/mapcheck/

I used the game #258126 (in case u wanna check/help with it). It
currently knows the following (basic) things:

1, it uses the savegame (best at -3950, even would be better the -4000
when people haven't moved yet, but there's no such savegame on
pubserver...would it be possible maybe?)

2, it recognizes type and possibly specials/rivers for the tiles.

3, it recognizes which tiles form an island 

It displays the info about the tile:

---------------------------
| type(island_number)     |
| food-production-trade   |
---------------------------

type: w-water, g-grassland, p-plain, h-hill, m-mountain, f-forest,
s-swamp, d-desert, a-glacier, j-jungle, t-tundra

island number: all different island should have different number. all
tiles of an island should have the same number. water tiles doesn't
belong to any island, their island__number is 0.

food-production-trade is w/ the specials but w/o any infrastructure or
goverment bonus. To make it easier to view i don't draw the empty (=no
special) water tiles.

Background of tiles represents the specials/waters (green special1, blue
special2, stronger color means river, strongest color means
river+special)

It's just the begining of this, just  wanted to inform you. Hopefully we
can find a proper algorithm for it.

bye, hirisov 

ps.: anybody's help who thinks can help w/ the formula is wellcome