Island/Continent Based Map?

[Peter]

I've got it. you can't set AA to 0- but you can set it to 0.001. I'm rendering a few images right now at various scales... I'm not sure how they'll actually look in play. It's only taking a few seconds for each image, and that's using a java raytracer on top of the texture renderer. It's not exactly optimized.

Oh, I should mention that Art of Illusion is open-source (naturally). You may be able to look at some of the code- particularly the perlin noise generator- and get some ideas.
Will include new maps in next post- whenever that happens.

[Peter]

Alright, here you go.
They're still a bit blobby, but there should be no Aliasing.
I've created a few different scale maps. I'm not sure which one best fits the tiles. Number 1 is definitely too large-scale. Number 4 is zoomed in 12 times.
EDIT: Forgot the color schemes: Tan is sand, pure green is grass. Dark green is broadleaf, lighter green is conifer. Lavender is heath, or possibly moor. Orange is dirt, yellow is tall grass, gray is stone and white is snow (my addition), cyan is swamp. I think that's all of them... Oh, I think that moor and heath are separate in-game. One's more swampy, I guess. I'll distinguish them in the future; as it stands, best just to treat all purple spaces as the pinkish grassland, which is probably heath.









Ways to improve it: lost of fine-tuning to do with the various relations. That's pretty easy. More difficult would be making a good height map; currently it uses just one layer. It's effectively a fractal. In the future I can make it multiple layers that stack in a un-fractal-like pattern.

[theTrav]

BOAT SUPREMACY!

I look forward to playing on this map

[theTrav]

I'd also like to mention that this map is not like earth at all please tweak your numbers for larger continents, less connectedness and larger oceans

[Peter]

Continents? No, not so much. These are pretty pathetically small islands. That's part of why I need to make a new height map generator... There should be more terrain variation.
Now, with something more object-oriented that what I'm using (pretty much a glorified flowchart), I could make these look significantly better. In particular, right now it generates each individual terrain and then stacks them and sorts out the most "likely" terrain for a given tile, biased to some type or the other depending on the elevation, which is why swamps and beaches are coastal, for instance. I'd like to add biases depending on moisture and nutrients, but each of those alone would more than double the complexity.

Of course, adding post-processing and rivers would certainly add something.

[Jackard]

Both water and land need connecting to form seas and continents. And yea, itd also be nice if you added latitudes or something so that the terrain wasnt so very evenly uniform in its randomness.

[Jackard]

have you seen the cartographer's guild forum?

it has some interesting ideas, like this http://forum.cartographersguild.com/sho ... php?t=4737

[roundedge]

where are the rivers?

[Peter]

I'm familiar with the cartographers. The tectonic simulation idea has a lot going for it, unfortunately it's beyond my experience, so I can't comment on it.
As for rivers, as I said, these are still basic maps. They need some postprocessessing (simple checks for artifacts like one-tile islands, which are pretty rare,) and river drawing, which is best done, in my opinion, by drawing them downhill from random, evenly spaced springs. You just draw the center line of the river and it looks at the raw height map and follows that downhill from there. Then pass back over and make the river wider as it flows. In my opinion, I think the last one is the best in terms of gameplay, but I haven't seen what they look like live.

I like the way that one grassy island on map 4 looks, and the cove between the main islands of map 3. Map 4 would just look odd... I think that each island would be barely more than a screen or two in size. Boats would certainly pwn on that map.

I'll keep tweaking it and maybe I'll figure out a river mock-up.

[Agarrett]

Wait, so you can make maps look more like Earth and not so blob like?