I started by looking at the 3D height which is image 1. I found this pretty hard to deal with. I tried various erosions and flow settings but basically it has a lot of complex ripple like noise which ends up as basins which flood into big big pools and was hard to persuade it to sort that out. In any case the amplitude of the noise is very large for being so close to the sea level. Thats not unheard of and I think Croatia coastline is like that - see Zadar but its not the sort of place that people have rushed to populate either and its not the sort of map I wanted to make.
Still within that constraint I thought that what we would have is a fen land with a lot of marsh and I believe that one of my neighbors has said that they want to go that route too. The thing now was that there is no geography to generate those pools so I figured that what would be good was a long ridge running through the middle of it. I also figured that it would make for a good dynamic that the main road through the land was along the ridge line and unusually all the low lands were the dangerous bits full of marshy swamp and creatures to boot.
So I got out the original coast and lake boundaries to match up and hand made some hills by painting about 4 shades of grey in and blurring them hard. Then I added a scaled version of that as a heightmap to a scaled down version of the original so that there was some of the original texture to the final map. It was about 50:50 or so. I also fixed some key rivers in place by joining up some of the smaller lakes with some darker lines on the height map.
Then I set it off with various erosion and flow stuff in my GeoTerSys which after a while produced the map below. It took a lot of faffing with various settings and basically I put the map into an ice age and let it thaw slowly. The ice cuts some of the blockages away like a glacier and roughens up the terrain in the right places too. When the water then flows it cuts more of the rivers and you can see where it thinks some of the rivers were in different places than I had put them so it has kinda broken the flow bit but thats cool.
The beaches were all auto generated by it. Theres a bit in the program that smooths out the low to high tidal areas to create beaches. I don't have very good cliff algorithms in the prog yet.
So after that we have the next pic which is my eroded height and then the same but colored. From this point I should be able to select a section and blow it up and up res it but thats for later.
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