Territory Map Generation

Question

Is there a trivial, or at least moderately straight-forward way to generate territory maps (e.g. Risk)?

I have looked in the past and the best I could find were vague references to Voronoi diagrams. An example of a Voronoi diagram is this:

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These hold promise, but I guess i haven't seen any straight-forward ways of rendering these, let alone holding them in some form of data structure to treat each territory as an object.

Another approach that holds promise is flood fill, but again I'm unsure on the best way to start with this approach.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The best reference I've seen on them is Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, which covers Voronoi diagrams, Delaunay triangulations (similar to Voronoi diagrams and each can be converted into the other), and other similar data structures.

They talk about all the data structures you need but they don't give you the code necessary to implement it (which may be a good exercise). In terms of code, an Amazon search shows the book Computational Geometry in C, which presumably comes with the code (although since you're stuck in C, you'd mind as well get the other one and implement it in whatever language you want). I also don't have any experience with this book, only the first.

Sorry to have only books to recommend! The only decent online resource I've seen on them are the two Wikipedia articles, which doesn't really tell you implementation details. This link may be helpful though.