Map concept for Haven (Great rivers)

[Woot]

I was thinking about jorbtar and loftorb's new ideas for short distance oathing, and reading through a lot of complaints about how this would change trade and travel between grids.
I am of the opinion that if overland travel was more common the world would feel less empty and that's a good thing. but that's just me.

So I got to thinking How did people use to travel? and landed on the idea from vaguely remembered mandatory reading of tom sawyer and huck finn, rafting down the Mississippi river.
So my idea was that, As is, right now we have riversystems that do not connect to other grids, but very wide very long single rivers that span multiple grids could be implemented to aid in travel, And even major projects for boats, Like a steam powered boat or some such.

The great rivers would be mostly straight, and would connect with smaller normal rivers, but the main river would be very clearly wider and different from the normal ones so you could count the river diversions like mile markers to know when to get off by plotting a trip with the map.

[anicsin]

Sounds good for me, but rivers are already dominating the map.

[loftar]

Yes, well, this would certainly be nice and I have long wanted to do it, but I can't say I have any good ideas for how to implement it. Making rivers connect between independently generated parts of the map is quite tricky, as there's no information in advance on whither they run.

[Woot]

Ah, a darn shame, is there no way to add them in after the map generation?
Or instead of a square map, more of a strip or rectangle, and have great rivers always generate predominately east and west?

Sorry if that changes nothing, I'm not very code savvy just bouncing ideas.

[Potjeh]

You could generate map in bigger chunks than supergrid, like the size of the current world. Than simply surround these chunks with water (think continents/large islands), and voila, the problem of rivers hitting map edges vanishes.

[painhertz]

I love the way rivers are now. leave them alone.

[the_portals]

One way linking rivers could work is to have the map generator make a list of rivers that flow out of their original chunk, then when another chunk is being generated, it reads said list. If any of the rivers lead into the chunk being generated, generate a random number to determine wether the river should end or keep going. When a chunk is generated and it sees there's a great river leading into it, the RNG process wouldn't go forward and the great river would just keep generating all the way to the opposite side of the chunk.

Alternatively, before things like hills, trees, and the ROB get placed in, convert the map into an image file where 1 pixel = 1 tile and the color means the tile ID, then go into paint.net and splash a thick line of blue through the middle, and put that in the machine for all of the details to generate.