Hi Everyone...

I'm not great with introductions - especially with people I don't know :p, so just a bit about me and what brought me here

I'm a small software developer living in Ireland and a total Wheel of Time fanatic. A while back I got the idea that it'd be cool to develop a really well built MMO for the WOT Universe. Over the last year or so I've gotten together a basic draft, demo and roadmap for the project and pretty much know what I want and at the moment I am fleshing it out further. The end goal of the project is not just a game, like World of Warcraft or one of the many other mmo's I'm sure you've heard of or played, but the develop a real living, breathing, organic, dynamic, changing world.

The primary goal is accuracy, realism, and dedication to the 'Rules of the traditional WOT Universe'. Think real life earth but in WOT terms (the power, source, pattern, ages, etc).

And one more thing - WOT Fans out there will know that the world Robert Jordan created ends in the 3rd age. - This game world is set in the 4th age. Millions, perhaps billions of years after the events of the book. Another age is ending... anyway

I have a small team of 5 developers at the minute and we are looking around for some other skills we are currently missing, map makers, models etc. The problem is scale. Its massive. Real-world Massive. Massive on a scale that I've never built for before and one thing has gotten me stumped...

Terrain. Maps. A world can't exist without them. Everything is built on it afterall.

  • First, I know jack all about building real-world organic terrains. At least on the kind of scale and complexity that I'm thinking of.
  • Second, my attempts at getting familiar with what I thought would be an easy subject lead me to see that I, and my circle of friends, are out of our debt on this one - great mapmaking is not as easy to achieve as I had thought!. So kudo's to the hard work of the various authors I have looked at these past weeks. There are some great attempts at creating WOT maps.
  • Third. Robert didn't create enough information from which to derive an actual real scale world from.


This is what I want to do, and hope to learn how to achieve by shamelessly lurking, asking questions and hopefully soliciting help along the way from fans that also may lurk here.

I hope to find/create terrain maps that I can use to create the various continents. They must be vagualy familiar to the traditional WOT world, but must not be the same and must be original or in the public domain. They must be detailed, large enough, so that I can generate around them a natural, organic world - familiar to fans, and enough to form the basis of our blank canvas from which to flesh it out a believable WOT planet.

Scale: 510,100,000 km²

Yes. You read that right. :p

They would be in a format, maybe similar to heightmapping (suggestions welcome) that I will be able to use to generate the in game world and terrain.

They will include all major mountain ranges, major rivers etc, landscape for all the regions.

After I have this general information, I plan to subdivide the various area's into regions where the different factions and territories reside. thankfully there are huge expanses of wilderness which I had hope to procedurally generate landscape for further detail.

Anyway, enough of that, it's going to be alot of work for me - and any suggestions for creating such large scale terrain would be welcome.

What I am hoping to find here though, is also the 'look good factor'. Actual detailed regional maps - I hope to solicit help of there is any to be found in creating regional maps for the important area's, cities, territories etc. Should be fun :p

The project will of course be open source. I will follow the rules of the forum (as I think I've learned them) and just create a WIP thread and upload my efforts. I hope that the curious, the fans, and others will go - hey... nice map... but, try this, or try that, or here is my two cents worth.

Right now all development is on a wiki which will be open to the public soon. This contains the game mechanics, backstory, world mechanics, source code and so on. everything really.

So, thats it, and me in a nutshell.

oh ps: Game title is Wheel of Time: World of Dreams