Blending different layers.

So, I took my precious "Forest island", and turned up the temperature a bit. I'm currently blending a "grassland" layer (default background for this theme), an "arid" layer, a "mountain" layer, and lastly a "forest" layer. The forest layer has a reduced blend opacity in this example, so that the island appears more arid and dry.

Hopefully this shows some of the potential behind the software, - I'm definitely excited!

Starting with theming!

I just wanted to quickly show off the first attempts at theming the landmass. So I started with a familiar look. Grasslands, forests, and mountains. I've left the oceans alone for the moment, and focused on the land. Keep in mind that this is the first iteration of many to come, but I have a good feeling after coding a few hours. I present,  "Forest island".

I will come back in a later blog post with technical details and the how-to's, once I've refined the techniques and experimented further.

There are forks in my river!

It's been a while since the last update. There are several reasons for this, all of them unrelated to my project. But finally, I have been able to find some time to continue my work. I showed off some river examples earliar, and both commenters and myself thought it would look better if rivers had tributaries, like real rivers almost always have. So that's what I've been working on latelty. It's not 100%, there are some occasional weird artifacts, but largely I'm happy. Here are some recent screenshots of rivers.

I'm closing (or shelfing, as I will most likely come back to them later!) the chapter of rivers for now, and I'm starting work on different parts of the map generation, - the themes. I hope you all like the current look of the rivers, - and keep in mind you'll be able to adjust their curvation, tributary frequency and other things yourself, once I'm done-done!

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!)

The evolution of rivers

Just a short update that shows off usage of what I've called the "river curve weight factor". Some of you mentioned that you thought the rivers were too curvy. So I've made multiple configurable options for rivers. The curve weight factor being one of them. I've added an animated gif that shows the factor in action, with the values 1.6, 1.4, 1.2, 1.0, 0.8, 0.6.

What do you think?

Clarifying a couple of things

Over the last week or two, I've had this nagging feeling in my stomach. The feeling that many of the readers might have misunderstood what I am trying to do here.

I'm just going to spill it; For those of you who think I am making a new feature rich map editor, where you can specify each and every little thing... I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's not it!


There's already a product out there that's good if you're looking for this kind of thing. I haven't tried it myself, but popular opinion seems to vouch for its quality. And that's Campaign Cartographer, which you can get at ProFantasy's web site.

So, back to my project. What am I trying to make? I'm trying to make a product for the lazy ones, for the ones who suddenly get the urge to play something in a new world setting and need the world now, and for those of us that aren't artists and want a good basis to found our game world on.

The first release of this product will be a web-based one-click creation process. A truth with minor modifications (you might have to check some checkboxes, and make some choices), but that's the jist of it.

You heard right. I want you to visit a web page. I want you to make some choices, and I want you to click a button. In return, I want to offer you a world setting.