Making better coastlines.

[Tracker]

Hello:
When I started getting into map making I thought, how hard could it be. Then I tried to draw up my first coastline. I was born on the east coast of the U.S. with ocean ten minutes south and 15 minuets north and 60 minuets west of ocean. I figured that I understand how the coast line works let me attempt to emulate it. Those words still haunt me every time I try to create a coastline. What I have done to help me, is to try to understand the type of coastline I want to create and then using an old world atlas I purchased at a used book store try to find one like the one I want t create and see how it looks and try to emulate it. It does not always work, however it has helped me over 70% of the time. I usually make the coastlines too heavy. Practice will help.

Tracker

[Zach]

I haven't been making digital maps for very long, but my current ones have all been generated from a fractal terrain program I wrote. Given some parameters, it outputs a greyscale PNG image that represents a heightmap of the terrain (which you can then add oceans to and get coastlines). It kind of looks like the "solid noise" filter in a lot of programs, but I believe the algorithm is different. It runs at about 5 megapixels per second.

I did several maps using the Realistic Coastlines Revisited tutorial for a while, but after I developed my program I switched to it because it gives better coastlines, in my opinion.

I'd be happy to make the program available to you, but only as source code. It's a small project and I can't build executables for other systems. Anyone know how to upload code files?