New World Gen: Island Solution

[Peter]

I think that the majority of H&H players would like some kind of oceanic or large-scale sea terrain features. However, creating a realistic world generator is not easy task. So, I have what I think would be a very straightforward compromise:

I've based this system off of these assumptions of your current system:
- You have two stages of map generation.
- These are:
- - Basic drawing, which places blobs of terrain like we are familiar with. There is a mathematical formula that draws these shapes, and there may be different formulas for some terrain types, such as drawing rivers in linear shapes and forests in blobs.
- - Implied drawing, which finds parts of terrain such as coastlines and adds things like sand beaches and deep water areas away from shore.

My suggestion is, again, very simple. All you need to do is add a step between the Basic drawing and the Implied drawing that will draw deep water in the inverse of the blob generator! In other words, rather than pasting cut-out paper shapes on the map, cut holes in an empty ocean map and put that on top of your basic map.

Of course, the "holes" that you cut would have to be much larger than normal terrain features, but that should be trivial.
Then you can run the Implied drawing step which adds beaches where appropriate, maybe it adds cliffs that tend to follow coastlines, and fixes little bugs line one-pixel islands, and you're done.

I can't promise that this will make the game world realistic, but it would make it more diverse, and allow for at least a little enlightenment-era age of sail exploration.

[Jackard]

this is going pretty deep into speculation

[Delamore]

And Loftar isn't retarded, you basically just said "make large islands"

[Jackard]

dont forget to add land

i think we can all agree, that that is the key here

[Pacho]

And Loftar isn't retarded, you basically just said "make large islands"

You have to admit, he did say it in a beautifully long way.

[Peter]

My suggestion was, I admit, an obvious one. I did not mean this as an insult to anyone's intelligence. I felt that since the new world generator does not have even this, as I said before, mundane and illegitimate aborted afterbirth of a sad excuse for an idea, implemented, then perhaps bringing it up would be best, just in case somehow it may indirectly inspire some kind of inspiration.

[Jackard]

i, too, love commas

[eql]

douchey replies guys.

[theTrav]

douchey replies guys.

seems pretty par for the course with del and jack

[loftar]

i, too, love commas

Hey, don't make fun of good syntax! I do not think it can be reasonably denied that the commas improved the readability of his phrasings by leaps and bounds, compared to how it would have been without them.

More to the point, the current map generator does, actually, generate islands, but they happen more as accidents than intentionally (though I like the results), and it can be argued that they are, at least most times, too small. I've been thinking of adding explicit islands myself, and I might still. (One of the best things with an indefinitely expandable map is that I can modify the map generator even after the reset to add new features to parts of the map that are generated later)

But yes, indeed. Generating a good map is really hard, and the current map generator can certain still be improved by leaps and bounds. I do think, of course, that the new maps will likewise be better than the current ones by leaps and bounds, but I don't really know exactly where to take the map generator in the future. Fractal terrain is certainly not entirely unconvincing, but whenever I've tried it, it yields too many weird artifacts that I have no good way to correct, and it's also quite hard to make it work well on a small scale. The current technique gives me better control over small-scale features, but is, instead, quite limited on the generation of large-scale features. Map generation will certainly have to be a continuous project...