Island/Continent Based Map?

[kaka]

Mine would be Cakeport, center of the earth.
It would be located on Cake Island in the Great Cake Sea.

[nutsnmango]

OMG loftar, I wan to go to the islnd map can I please goo can I can I can I?

[Pacho]

oh man with these maps I wouldn't mind losing all my work on the current map just to have awesomesauce like this

[nutsnmango]

tis map is very beautiful, Loftar thanks for the teleport.

What I think is that instead of having a reset that has a map that is all islands, maps like these should be added in the entire fourth tier. That way the map until the third tier can be a huge central continent. If all the upcoming tiers are island maps then the central grids (second and third tier) can be the central continent and then there's smaller continents and islands on the edges of the map. The problem with this is that newbies will never get to see these beautiful maps.

Also I believe that there needs to be some sort of tropical forest type of ground if you really are gonna make palm trees a sNao suggestes, and I know thats not very norse-ish but I think it'd be so pretty and lively.

[Yuki]

Summon me at the test map, I wanna look around.

The Jack Frehorn character, please.

[Fluffy]

It appears I have accidentally spawned back at my hearth fire.. D: resummon if it's not a hassle >.>
edit:..nevermind, I have to log off for a bit.

[warrri]

Well theres nothing there except for some wildlife(no trees, no boulders, no hq minerals etc, so dont get too excited about this).

The map itself is awesome because of the islands, but there are indeed some weird looking places. I would very like a tweaked version of this to be the next map.

[Peter]

Oddly, there aren't even forage-able plants... though I'm not entirely sure that there aren't geology points...

Well, I'm really pleased with the continents map. Oh, by the way, the white diamonds mark multigrid corners.

I'm really pleased with the simplicity of the generator, too.
It all goes back to the Perlin noise generator. This does tend to create realistic-looking terrain, but it only does so on small scales; look a the earlier maps to see what I mean. It creates a jumble of islands with a very flat distribution.

What I've done is take the large-scale blobbiness of the noise map and small-scale detail and combined them. The way I've done this is first by generating two perlin noise heightmaps, and adjusting them so that one has values between 0 and 0.6, and the other 0.4 to 1.0 (where 0 is the bottom of the sea, 0.5 is sea level, and 1.0 is the top of mountains).

Thus, One map will look like open ocean with scattered islands, and the other will look like rocky mountains with a few lakes.

Then, I generate one more perlin noise map, but only a simple one- a low-resolution one (I'll put up some illustrations when I get to that machine and can render them). I use this map as the continent map; it has highs where there will be mountains, lows in the seas, and coastal areas and bays are also defined.

Finally, I use the third map to "interpolate" the highlands map and the lowlands map. Interpolation is basically a weighted averaging; in this case, in places that are designated mountains on the continents map, the output is biased towards the highlands map, and open sea on the continents map is biased towards the lowlands map. And, near the beaches, they are roughly averaged. This gives all the detail of the small maps while preserving the high-level order of the continent map- in other words, preventing the map from turning into mush on large scales.

This makes all the new features in the new maps. Now, there's some tweaking in all of that (in particular, I have a bit here and there where I change the distribution of elevations in the continent map, so it's more like a set of coherent shapes rather than kind of fading together out of islands), but that's the key parts right there.

I'll attach a copy of the generator when I get home, but anyone who wants to look at it will need Art of Illusion and java and java somethingorother to run it.

EDIT: Hmmm... Looking at the map, there isn't quite enough biome variation yet. It's actually pretty realistic, but it looks odd. I'm going to try increasing moisture and elevation variation on the small scale. I might add something like "moisture continents" too, just t experiment, but that would probably just lead to entire multigrids full of grasslands, which while realistic would also get boring.

On the multi-contenent map, for instance, a large town might control an area the size of one of the small islands in the top-left multigrid. Even then, it'd have to be a big town.

Still tinkering.

[Yuki]

I got raped by a level 10 bear. Which seem to be everywhere, because there's no civilization.

[Fluffy]

On the multi-contenent map, for instance, a large town might control an area the size of one of the small islands in the top-left multigrid. Even then, it'd have to be a big town.

Keep in mind towns are small places with definite borders(solid claim). Kingdoms are large areas with indefinite borders(e.g. not one solid claim). A kingdom would be more likely to control those islands or multiple ones, towns would just inhabit parts of them.

Just saying this incase you're thinking of shrinking them.