Applying biomes to a Wilbur-enhanced map...?

[Kyrel]

Excellent, I'll download the latest version and play around with that... and thanks for the tips for the sea too

[jbgibson]

Did you see what Waldronate meant about odd rivers? For all the awesomeness of the mountains generated this way, to me it's jarring to have rivers going nowhere. Or for that matter, ending improbably. Your Sevauvud/ Aelon/ Geran one, and the Ponzala/ Cirelia ones probably ought to behave differently, winding up at the ocean. If I generate some reasonably plausible terrain with Fractal Terrains, I still manually complete "stuck" rivers, connect mid-continent dead-end lakes with an outflow somehow, and otherwise fix stuff that just looks unlikely. I mean, yeah, there are real-world basins with no outflow - but most minor ones either fill up until they do overflow, or (ages later) have worn that outflow down to a slot through the 'barrier rim'. Here I'm referring to your southern Kaelia and northwestern Sevauvud terminal lakes. The big one mid-Elohabor could be plausible. You could sell me on the one in western Elohabor having no outlet - depends on the exact terrain south of it and how much rainfall the basin gets.

As far as the biomes / climate you're depicting - they're not inherently implausible, just don't fall into a stereotypical "north = snowy wastes, south = arid desert" without planning to do so. The latitudes you're working with make all the difference. Deserts, on an Earthlike world, would tend to fall around the 20-35 degree north and south range; a matter of air circulation, not "equator=hot". Other wetness and dryness come both from latitude and generalized seasonal airflow, coupled with rain-shadow effects from mountain chains. Ice could just as well be antarctic as arctic. Just how much of your globe does this map depict, and where on the globe is it? <never mind - I see the later post placing this on your globe.>

<I'd suggest calling the north edge just 70 or 80 degrees north, which may be what you mean by "near the north pole", since there's none of the distortion you'd expect on a rectangular projection as it nears 90 degrees north. But yeah, if you figure the south edge as a sahara-ish latitude, drier climate is quite believable.>

They're nice maps, both the political and the topographic versions. Personally, I want the canal concession at the south of Kaelia. The little terminal lake there is actually ideal to supply water to the 'peak' of a set of locks going over the divide.

[Kyrel]

Thanks for all the feedback jbgibson

First off, about the rivers... yeah, I agree with the Sevauvud/Aelon/Geran one, but I think I made the Ponzala->Cirelia one run out of the ocean; I wanted the two countries to have animosity, and Ponzala could tamper with freshwater supplies heading to the Cirelian capital (which is on the river/ocean mouth) hence why I made it run there. To be honest, though, the rest aren't that important to me... I tried using the 'River Flow' tool in Wilbur to give me more plausible rivers but that just generated a near-infinite amount of tiny ones running everywhere I think if I want 'proper' rivers I'll have to modify my alpha map, removing all the river channels I put in manually... and then put it into something which will generate 10/15 large plausible rivers around the whole area.

And yes, for the biomes, the world spans from 75° N to around 25°N, I'd think. I downloaded the latest Wilbur (1.77) and I'm trying to figure out the Latitude shader tool, but where do I tell it 'right, this map starts at 25°N and ends at 75°N, put these colours there'?

[waldronate]

The latitude shader works with the map information. Wilbur assumes that the editing area is a rectangular block of latitude/longitude coordinates with a height at each point. Surface>>Map Info lets you set the latitude/longitude edges of the map. Use Texture>>Shader Setup to bring up the shaders settings. The Blending tab controls how to mix the various channels. It's a straight blend between the RGB values, so it's not as useful as some other shader options might be..

Using a random world with your specified latitude range and just the altitude shader (facing=0,latitude=0,altitude=1,slope=0,texture=0) gives the following:



Using a slightly edited color map for the latitude shader, I obtained the results shown below using just the latitude shader (facing=0,latitude=1,altitude=0,slope=0,texture=0) :



Using (facing=0,latitude=2,altitude=1,slope=0,texture=0) gives the following results:



Using (facing=1,latitude=4,altitude=2,slope=0,texture=0) gives the following results:



Simple color ramps for facing can give an effect very broadly like the difference between north slopes and south mountain sides, a color ramp for slope can give more intense greens in basins and less intense results on the steeper areas, and so on. The Wilbur shader can be fun to play with, but you have to go to several places to get the results that you want and it's hard to tell in advance what will happen where. I've been told that this sort arrangement is not conducive to "fun" with the software and I may or may not work on that if I get some free time.

[Kyrel]

Quick question... in the Map Info box, what units are the numbers in? Are they just normalized (so 1 means 90°/polar), or what do they mean?

I tried playing around with the settings but all I got was a dark blue/grey sea...

Also, if I give Wilbur an alpha map with all rivers removed, can I get it to make several large rivers, rather than a near infinite array of tiny ones?

[waldronate]

The numbers should be interpreted as degrees when you wish to use features that function in real-world units. Otherwise, they can be interpreted in whatever manner is convenient. For the images above, I used degrees (thus, 75 top, 25 bottom, -25 left and +25 right to match the aspect ratio of the image).

The latitude shader Ice Caps value, unfortunately, is done in normalized nuits as you observed above. Consistency is not a strong suit of Wilbur. Features have been accreting for 16 years now and most of the features weren't really designed to work together as a coherent whole.

Wilbur routes rivers downhill. If downhill doesn't go very far before there's an upholl segment (as is the case with virtually all fractal / cloud algorithms used as heightfields), then rivers will be very short. Wilbur has Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins to fill in those pesky pits and let rivers flow across the landscape. Wilbur will not route rivers very well for a map that you intend to have a lot of endorheoric basins (those without flow to the sea) because it will fill in the basins.

From left to right below, there is an unfilled terrain and the rivers that result from it. Because the landscape is covered in little pits, rivers can't go far before they encounter an endpoint (in Wilbur, rivers are calculated as thresholded flow values rather than attempting to drop bundles of water on the surface and let them slosh around). The Fill Basins operation fills in the little pits as if they were full of something (perhaps water, perhaps something else). These filled basins allow large flows to accumulate, which the flow computations will allow to be seen as long rivers. A little bit of noise added to the filled surface (followed by another fill basins to get rid of the new tiney pits formed by the noise) will prevent rivers from flowing straight across the filled areas and make them wander around a little.