awesome! thanks waldronate! thats some good info to start.

At least as i get started, i'm not going to attempt anything extremely crazy or difficult, but i'll probably attempt to do things in a DF style grid system... at least for visuals... so you have a world view, where things are fairly generic, and a grid in world view would basically only signify general stats like "grassland", "mountain", or "sea"... then have one or more more localized grids for each of those grid cells which break them apart and do things in more detail. I'd love to be able to flex my GIS muscle on a world like i've always wanted to, be able to run hydrology analysis and such to find watersheds and therefore ecosystems.. but i'm going to attempt to be realistic at this point and just go for a good looking world that makes some sense. having a shader for edges and one for corners will probably be a big help, and something i never thought of.


As is, i'm hoping to run things like a tectonic sim or possibly ice-ages at a fairly high level pass, as is very vague.. probably large blocks, more to identify a grid cell's type and possible highest peak or lowest point instead of trying to get into great detail. I'm not too worried about time, within reason of course... and i figure like DF that it's time well spent... and should only need to be done at the beginning. there is however a lot i'd like to do however.. some of such would be of course, geography, climate, ecology... placement of flora/fauna possible placement of civs... (i plan to do so in a list, basically have an animals requirements listed, and place them in area's that they could live)... and.. if i do civs, like df, i'd like to maybe run a bit of historical content... but at first anyways, i'd rather just throw you in a world with animals to hunt, or be hunted by.

All of this is a pipe dream tho, and i'd be happy with having a small program that builds a simple world i could fiddle with for the rest of my life