Thinking Big - Torq's landgrab - choose a territory

[Redrobes]

So many land-locked lakes!

Yeah I know but its a horribly hard problem to solve. I asked Su-Liam about this on another thread and the MeDem guys and myself have been working on it for ages and it can be mitigated to some extent but its very hard to completely eliminate. My instant islands program would not have done any better but if you build up the land in bits keeping water flow involved it will mostly fix it but its really heavy compute stuff.

[NeonKnight]

For land locked lakes I just raise the land levels for those areas (fudge them in other words ) to eliminate the issue.

Either that or I 'fake out' the coast lines in areas to make them large inland areas. A real world example is the straights of gibraltar and the mediterainean and the Baltic Sea around Germany, Finland, Poland and area. But, yeah it is a problem with ALL Terrain simulations I have seen

[ravells]

I'm confused...aren't all lakes landlocked by definition?

I think Redrobes is right....made into a new thread for greater visibility.

[NeonKnight]

LOL! Yeah, sorry, LAND-LOCKED SEAS! By default most of the large masses of water are shown at Sea Level.

[RobA]

Yeah what he said!

Basically the program generates "potholes" at sea level that rivers flow into but not out of.

Compare that to (for example) the great lakes in North America... Lake Superior sits at about 180 m above sea level (surface) and has a maximum depth of about 400 m (~220 m below sea level). This flows into Lake Erie which has a surface at about 175 m but maximum depth of only about 65 m (~ 110 ABOVE sea level ) then a big drop into Lake Ontario at 74 m above sea level, which then winds down the St. Lawrence river until it gets to sea level at the Atlantic Ocean.

To extend this, lakes tend to sit above sea level, To do this in a program requires manually (or at least I haven't found a nice easy way...?) running the water level up to find areas that would "pool" and be contained when rivers run into them.

-Rob A>

[Redrobes]

...running the water level up to find areas that would "pool" and be contained when rivers run into them.

I have done a demo of this in the past - this one is filling it up to a predetermined height though if set slightly differently to keep going it would overflow and cut an erosion channel and drain it out. The other prog I know can do it is GeoControl. I expect there are others tho.

On the terrain front, I will probably slightly modify the coastline. We don't have a depth below sea (bathymetry) which I will be manually making otherwise my sea will evaporate (!???) and this is likely to alter the coast slightly.

[loogie]

ravells.. u sir are clever.

landlocked lakes (i assume) are lakes with no rivers or any other means of water flowing to an ocean...

and yeah, thats why i try to stay away from terrain gens, they're much to random for me... i try to make my own as geographically sound as possible, and let programs like arcview do the rest...

i remember back in the day, i found some kind of work gen software that was amazing (from what i remember, and it was a long time ago, so it might not have been that good)... but from what i remember, it went through a planets birth... where it had its lava stage, cooling, continents were made, continental drift, rivers and lakes forming and so forth.. it even had climates, precipitation and a bunch of other stuff and it was all done in icons not fractal or bump mapping or anything... i played around with the shareware of it, but i was a kid so no money to buy it...

[Gamerprinter]

Sure the Great Lakes have the St. Lawrence River to drain it and many lakes are the sources of rivers, however some lakes or inland seas are where the rivers flow to and only evaporate or fill the lake.

Think of Lake Baikal, Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea, even the Dead Sea. Not all waters flow to the sea.

I'm not countering the arguement that FT like most terrain generators have all water at sea level only is the real problem - just making a point.

[DarkOne]

I am out for this round of land grabs. I would to focus as much of my time to my 3D planet generation. Hopefully it won't produce those sea level land locked seas and lakes.

[su_liam]

I'm kind of tempted by 19 or 25, but I don't know what I'd do with it other than name it the Coriander Coast. Probably 19. I see a Sanctuary Bay and a possible Cordillera Barrera in there.