2/10/2012

Decisions, decisions...

Latest progress

Lately, I've been continuing my work on river generation, and currently I am working on tributaries. I'll post some screenshots soon, when I am happy enough with the results.

Planning ahead

Beyond that, I've done alot of thinking. I've been putting it a bit off, but recent comments spurred the process forward, and forced me to think more thoroughly on what I want to produce. I'm leaning more and more away from creating maps that focus heavily on realism. The plan was always to create something that would primarily be useful as game worlds and tactical roleplaying maps, - basically fantasy maps. So with that in mind, I've decided to produce maps of different sizes, and with different pre-defined themes. (Pre-defined does not mean that new themes won't be added, they definitely will).

Theme could be for instance a "parchment theme", as shown below.



Another theme could be an "earthlike theme".



A third theme could be something like this.




Now, even if you would have to select a theme, there will still be quite a few options to tweak, to create the kind of map you want, for that given theme. The exact specifics of what will be user preferences is yet to be decided, but I'm coding most things to be customizable.

If you already have themes in mind that you would find interesting and useful, - maybe something the internet is not already littered with, please let me know!

(The images linked here are not mine, I only wanted to display them as good examples of what I might want to do!)

3 comments:

  1. I like where you're going with those. Are you expecting to use the same underlying algorithm's and/or data for different themes?

    If yes, you can generate the data, then select from several different display themes that show the same underlying structure. Kind of like the difference between a highway map and a topographic map of the same area.

    Or, you can have the theme be important to the data itself, so that a tundra map, a desert map, and a mountain map are all inherently different, such that the same seed on each would produce radically different maps.

    Of course, you could always do both...

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  2. It's probably going to have to be a mix of both.

    For most of the themes, I am expecting to be able to use the same functionality to create the different looks.

    A theme would consist of a collection of different filters. Filters will be added on top of the underlying heightmap (which is the basis for everything, no matter the theme), as layers. And each layer has its own way of producing values based on the layer(s) below it.

    My intention for now is that the same seed will always generate the same geographic results. But specific layers will be able to modify the topology by (for example) flattening the heightmap, increasing the water level, clamping map corners to make sure you always produce an island, and so forth.

    I am anticipating that for some themes I might have to take an alternative route in the code, but those are the exception to the rule, and will be seamlessly plugged into the generation process through a general interface.

    The software is going to guarantee that for a given map size, given map options, and a specific seed, the result is always going to be the same, pixel by pixel.

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  3. Hi there. Nice background! I just wanted to drop a line to a fellow world builder. Good stuff, keep it up.

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