Working on a ambitious world generating tool...

[covatex]

The main idea is to make the DM's life easy, not to make the DM's life
Roads, city positions (even number and type of cities) and forests and mountain icon positions are pregenerated, but you can erase them, or add completelly new ones.
City plans, and floor plans are generated on demand, but you can easily (is this the correct spell? ) edit them.

Content generator engine is ready! Actually names for pins and region maps are generated with a grammar (you can grab your notepad and edit the grm file to add, delete or modify productions and chances of apparition) There's also a pc and npc generator (including race, feats, skills, class, traits, pictures, etc... -all configurable-) based on the same engine, but this is a matter of another kind of forum, isn't iti?

As I said in previous post I'm having some troubles to put the rivers. I know how rivers must go (from hills to sea, growing as they reach the ocean, with 'meandros' in plains, etc.) but I can't get a good natural looking algorithm to do that. Pathfinding stuff doesn´t produce good results... And rain erossion destroys the base map... Any ideas? (this was for coders...)

Are there any special features you are interested in?
What do you think about the look & feel?
Any ideas and critics are wellcomed!

Regards

[Sigurd]

Ambitious indeed.

Qs.

What format are you storing your graphics files in?

I notice all your examples are square. Is that the current field of your algorithms?

What programming language(s) are you using?

Have you thought about working through individual aspects separately? If so, do you have a part of the process you're working on right now? You know, if the interesting bit is the world making. You might be able to make some cool filters for the Gimp or Photoshop. You'd be spared from doing the rest of the interface.

Can you generate your rivers on a separate layer and then apply only localized erosion around the rivers to preserve the rest of your map? Or offer a sliding scale to the user starting with the rivers and proceeding with the rest of the erosion?


Sigurd

Good luck

[covatex]

Ambitious indeed.

Qs.

What format are you storing your graphics files in?

I notice all your examples are square. Is that the current field of your algorithms?

What programming language(s) are you using?

Have you thought about working through individual aspects separately? If so, do you have a part of the process you're working on right now? You know, if the interesting bit is the world making. You might be able to make some cool filters for the Gimp or Photoshop. You'd be spared from doing the rest of the interface.

Can you generate your rivers on a separate layer and then apply only localized erosion around the rivers to preserve the rest of your map? Or offer a sliding scale to the user starting with the rivers and proceeding with the rest of the erosion?


Sigurd

Good luck

Sigurd:
The map generator is in C++, and write BMP's. You can then -if you want- convert them to GIF or JPG. The main application is in VB6, and reads an ASCII .map file containing info of roads, pins, locations, graphic files locations height, width, comments...

As I am using the diamond sqare fractal algorithm the maps are sqare, but in the .map you can specify your height and width. I am planning to add the Perlin noise algorithm in the generation (as in Terragen, using both diamond sqare and Perlin noise)

About being spared from doing the rest of the interface, I actually WANT to do the whole interface! so I can keep control of all the features.

About generating the rivers in a separate layer is a pretty good idea, and the post erossion could work too, but the actual problem is to define a credible river path considering the geological surroundigs and the climate/precipitations.

I will start thinking about the post-erossion and the posibilities of the extra river-lake layer. Thx a lot for your comments.

Regards

[Ascension]

I know nothing about programming but my thought would be to have "markers" for things like high points, low points, wet points, lakes, and other things like that. Then you could just connect the markers with a straight line. Additional marker points means more meander in the line. How one would do this I have no idea...I just know how I might approach it (like a theory). Cheers.

[covatex]

Ascension:
I alrready have those points marked! but straight lines are really ugly! Even "S" lines are ugly and unnatural...
Regards

[Redrobes]

ViewingDale does render on the fly. Its basically a scene graph editor / renderer. It works on a hierarchy of images and it manages the scale so that it displays only whats needed on the screen and doesn't try to draw whats not on the screen. So it draws only the bit of continent that it needs to draw. As you zoom in there is usually more detail but the extents are smaller too. At a certain point which we have reached now, computers were able to draw the detail vs extents at a speed where its useful. Actually in the last few years we have more power than is necessary. There is a setting in the program which tells it how much detail to draw so if you have lots of power then it can draw down to very small stuff otherwise you can say cut it off when its at a certain level.

So there is no limit to the overall complexity of the world, only a limit to the complexity at the bit your looking at. And with modern PCs and graphics thats now pretty complex. It can draw about 100,000 objects a second. So the worst case is a forest full of single tree objects and you zoom out to a point where each tree just about needs to be drawn. Of course, you don't normally draw forests by the individual tree.

If your set on doing it in this direction then consider OpenSceneGraph or Ogre game engines. But even then I wouldn't think they would be able to do the job that ViewingDale does as fast as it can. There's a new API out called OpenCL which looks like it might replace some of the scene graph engines by using GPU assist for them. Don't know much about that at this stage. It was only publicized late this year.

You might also consider using WorldWind as a means of displaying maps too. When I tried it last time it was slow though I hear its got better in the last few years.

SeerBlue on these boards codes up maps into the format required by the Google API. Theres some newer tools to do that in a limited way now too. Though I don't like the fact that its hard to then edit the maps afterwords. Also, the map needs to be streamed from a web server which I guess you could install one locally. But that's all faff I wanted to bypass.

My GeoTerSys (GTS) is unreleased and ongoing - forever ongoing. Thats a really hard thing to write and its hard mainly due to the water bit. I track lots of water parameters doing sediment, erosion, velocity and momentum etc and it still wont do meandering or oxbow lakes. I have been on that about 2 years and ViewingDale about 4 plus there was an application prior to the final version of ViewingDale which I called Mapper and I started that in about 1990 on the Commodore Amiga. Both of these two make up only about half of what you have in mind. I don't wish to put you off, but your looking at about 10 years work in front of you.

[covatex]

... I don't wish to put you off, but your looking at about 10 years work in front of you.

I hope not!!!

[Redrobes]

Everyone is finding it hard to do water flow accurately. There has been a number of people who have something that's an approximation to it. All of them have good and bad. The better ones seem to be very slow.

To do the wobble in a river thats a "meander" so similar word. Check out the wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander

also Rilles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rille

If you want them in your rivers you will need to track sediment as well as water. You have to put down sediment that the water carries until the river changes direction. To do that you need to track the water speed and possibly pressure. It all starts to get hard very quickly.

I write one called GeoTerSys on my sig below.

I also write a zoom campaign manager too. Thats on the sig as ViewingDale. If your able to view AVI movies with an XviD codec look through these movies:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2182

Try using VLC movie viewer.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Also check out:
Wilbur - http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html
GeoControl - http://www.geocontrol2.com/e_index.htm
L3DT - http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/
WorldaMachine - http://www.world-machine.com/features.html
http://www.iahr.org/membersonly/graz...00/000/364.htm

The last one has some maths about the physics behind the process. You might have to simplify the process tho. Theres a big list of references there too to go through.

Oh yeah, also check out these movies from Ron Fedkiw's page of research work with his students. Some of the fluid ones are particularly interesting. The papers for them are available though difficult to understand and definitely difficult to implement for large terrain surfaces.
http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/

[covatex]

Redrobes:
I've been watching your work in ViewingDale and I must say that is a really AMAZING work!!! The zoom level is incredible! How do you do that? Do you keep separate resolution images? is everything on the fly?
The quality of the terrain graphics is impecable!
Congratullations

I'll check the links you've just send me. Thx a lot, and congratullations again!