City Symbols (Part 15): Culture Identifiers

I took a nice long break from Dragons Abound during the Christmas holiday, but now I'm back to continue to work on city symbols.  One feature I've wanted to have with my city symbols is to tie them to the city's culture, so that all the city symbols for a particular territory (culture) would have similar features distinct from other cities.

Typically territories are distinguished on maps by colors, and Dragons Abound has options for using colors to display territories or to mark borders, as in this example:

So one obvious feature I can add is to have any city flags be the color of the city's territory.  That's a little bit more complicated than you might expect, but after some refactoring:

Here you can see that Shimpes is flying flags that match its border color.

The flags are a pretty subtle indicator.  In general, I'd like to be able to style the city icons in more obvious ways based upon the territory in which they fall.  By changing building selection, colors, etc., I can make more distinct icons.  So I need to extend the code that varies the flag colors based on territory to vary any generation parameter.

Once that's done, I can pick different colors, roof styles, etc., and generate city icons for different territories that are visually quite distinct:

Eventually, I might tie the city icons to features of the territory's culture.  For example, if a territory is populated by dwarves, then the city icons can be gray to indicate the cities are built with stone.  Another possibility is to use city icons to indicate the merging or splitting of cultures.  For example, if a Culture A conquers Culture B, that could be indicated by making the icons for the conquered cities be a mix of the icons from Culture A and the icons from Culture B.

As is often the case as I work on developing Dragons Abound, I wrote a couple of different versions of icon generation (in the style of Skies of Fire and then Torfani), and then wrote the above code to modify the icon generation based on territories.  At this point, I understood enough to abstract the icon generation into a generic version that can be driven by parameters (instead of having different generators for different styles).  This gives me flexibility to experiment with different styles without having to touch the actual code.  It also means that when I add a new feature (say territory colors) it becomes available for all the icon styles.

For example, here's the Skies of Fire icon style as created by the generic generator, modified to use the territory colors for the building colors (instead of all red as in the original map):

Note that in this version of the map, it's much easier to tell whether Miet belongs to Kiil or to the territory above it.