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Hands-On Game Development with Rust

Calling Cellular Automata Maps

Explore how to apply cellular automata techniques to generate dynamic dungeon maps in Rust. Learn to position players by calculating distances, spawn monsters strategically in open spaces, and integrate these steps into your map builder for a more complex game environment.

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Place the adventurer

In the room-based architecture, placing the adventurer was easy. We simply put them in the first room. But now, there are no clearly defined rooms with this algorithm, so we have to use a different approach. In this case, we’ll find all of the floor tiles and determine their distance to the center. We’ll then start the player in the closest open tile to the center. Add another function to CellularAutomataArchitect:

Rust 1.40.0
fn find_start(&self, map: &Map) -> Point {
        let center = Point::new(SCREEN_WIDTH/2, SCREEN_HEIGHT/2); 
        let closest_point = map.tiles
            .iter()
            .enumerate()
            .filter(|(_, t)| **t == TileType::Floor)
            .map(|(idx, _)| (idx, DistanceAlg::Pythagoras.distance2d(
                center,
                map.index_to_point2d(idx)
            )))
            .min_by(|(_, distance), (_, distance2)| 
                distance.partial_cmp(&distance2).unwrap()
            )
            .map(|(idx, _)| idx)
            .unwrap(); 
        map.index_to_point2d(closest_point)
}

  • Line 2: This stores the center of the map in a Point.

  • Line 4: This iterates all map tiles.

  • Line 5: This calls enumerate() to append the tile’s index in the tile vector to the result. Each iteration now contains a tuple of (index, ...