Island/Continent Based Map?

[theTrav]

Why does everyone ignore the idea that is realistic, fast, and actually crosses mapgrid borders correctly?
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2408

I think you got quite a few comments.

When talking to Loftar about it his primary concerns seemed to be around
1 - Managing the post processing in a way that doesn't cause strange map borders
2 - Ensuring that a meaningful, continent like pattern emerges at the extremely large scale.

For 1 my suggestion was to do something like:
generate your height map
derive your features from it
check all your features for minimum size, remove ones that are too small
If a feature is on the edge of generated territory, either
a) remove it
b) generate small chunks out from this feature until you've either achieved the minimum required feature size, or determined that it's too small and needs deleting.

It's not a trivial exercise though, and I've got no clue how to achieve 2

[Peter]

Large scale stuff is all part of the algorithm. It's entirely possible and just as easy as details of any scale. You can make an entire continent in just the same way as you make a tiny pool. That's because they are always the same thing; an emergent property of individual cells. The cell do not care, nor are aware of, neighboring cells. I myself, using only the crudest of toolsets, made entire planets with details down to the mile.

As for 1- bah. bah, and bah again. That is trivially easy. Simply make it generate an extra, say, hundred tiles on each edge, run the post-processing, and crop them.

And if anyone else has a problem with procedural generation, I will personally freeze them in ice and leave them at the north pole.

[loftar]

I do not believe that a purely fractal-based map generator would be any fun at all. In particular, it lacks features like rivers, mountain passes, climate zones, and many more. Some of those, like rivers, could theoretically be added in some kind of post-processing, but it is very unclear how to make such techniques work across generation zone borders, indeed (for instance, if you generate rivers by taking some point, and then tracing along the height map, you'd get into trouble when you generate a new map zone, and a river creation wants to continue into some previously existing zone). Also, it is not obvious how to post-process away such, in human eyes obviously ridiculous, features as 50x50 meter lakes.

A purely fractal-based generator does have some features that the current maps don't, indeed, but in the lack of the aforementioned features, I find it hard to believe that they would be much superior to the current maps. At least not superior enough to warrant an iteration of the map-generator of their own.

It should be mentioned that the current revision of the map generator was never intended to be any kind of "final" generator -- it just had some of the features that we currently wanted to test, including prospecting for mines, rivers, caves, and some more terrain variations. I will be spending some serious effort in thinking about the next-generation mapgen, but so far I have not made much progress. There are many other issues that have priority over the next map reset, right now.

[Jest]

Why does everyone ignore the idea that is realistic, fast, and actually crosses mapgrid borders correctly?

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2408

Because it's in Critique/Ideas and nobody goes there.

[sabinati]

I'd also like to see a map with more mountains. There is a lack of mountains on the current map.

i disagree *lives on a mountain*

[Peter]

No, no, no! Not Fractal! Fractal is different from Procedural. First of all, natural terrain is not self-similar. What defines mountains is not what defines hills. I go into detail in my last thread on the subject, and I'll spare everyone my going back over it.

What, you've never seen a 50x50 meter pool? Artifacts like two or three tile islands can be found easily enough, though really they aren't that objectionable. I imagine simply flooding tiles and marking them as "good" if there's more than three continuous tiles or however many, then contineueing until the whole region has been marked good or not. Then it's simply a matter of making each bad tile match some adjacent good tile, and it's all fixed up.

As for rivers, it would be quite easy to generate a margin of perhaps a hundred or a thousand tiles around a specific tile, then run the post-processing, which would draw rivers and mountain passes and find artifacts, then crop the margins off. If rivers would run off the map at that point, you mark them with a new river source for later worldgen, and next time you gen a region, you can load up that list of border rivers. And don't worry about rivers flowing from a new region into an old one; with a healthy margin, you'd locate all rivers that could possibly flow onto a region when it's first created. Just find the longest possible slope and add some extra to that and there you go.

Climate zones are far easier to do with Procedural maps than anything I can think of. Sure you can plop "tropical" zones here or there, but there will be sharp boarders unless you find a way to draw gradual transitions, which will need to interact in combination. With Procedural design, all you must do is add a temperature map and tie the output tile's type to the temperature. Your semitropical zones will be between tropical and temperate zones because the temperature's right, not because they where placed there.

And hey, I could eat a plate of tie-die yarn alfresco and vomit a better-looking map than what we have. Don't you think something like this:

Each pixel roughly equal to a tile
Would be better than something with more pasta art?

I'm not saying to remake the map in my image right now. But really play with some procedural design. It can do some great things.
Now if you'll excuse me, I must go plug in my icemaker.

[theTrav]

that pic you show is the best so far, but can you generate one and pan out a little so we get something that looks roughly analogous to earth?

[Peter]

I've got something with all the current tile types (plus snow for the lols), now I just need to add a separate noise filter for each layer- that'll be pretty quick- and then build the main height map generator. I can toss in some stuff to make continents as a part of that.

I'd finish it up now, but my lunch break is over.

[bajuba]

I've got something with all the current tile types (plus snow for the lols), now I just need to add a separate noise filter for each layer- that'll be pretty quick- and then build the main height map generator. I can toss in some stuff to make continents as a part of that.

I'd finish it up now, but my lunch break is over.

I had lasagna, you?

[Peter]

Frozen rice bowl FTW.

I've got something together that looks OK. I wouldn't use it myself yet, but it's definitely got the basic features- large and small details and structures. I'll render a few simple maps later.