May/June Lite Entry: Gulf of Malabor

[gilgamec]

Well, I've finally got forests looking acceptable. (But not perfect. I still don't think the colour fits.) Basically, I add green shapes to the sketch:

then use the same technique as I use for generating the coastline to create the outlines of forests. I then place points according to a Poisson process, drawing them as lit spheres, and render them just like the mountains (but in green).

[gilgamec]

Well, I'm not going to be able to do any more work on this before Wednesday, so I'll post my final version here now. I didn't get as far as I had hoped, but I'm not entirely embarrassed by the final result, so I'll consider it a success.

I tried to rerender it at 4k x 4k, and discovered two things:

1. Some of my code is exorbitantly inefficient. The entire map takes less than five minutes to create from scratch at 1k x 1k, but at 4k x 4k, it took over four hours. As nearly as I can tell, none of the procedures should take that much time, so I must have messed something up along the way.
2. I haven't caught all of the scale dependencies. At 4k x 4k, the height map is pretty much the same, but the river systems are wildly different. (And for the worse.) This is why I decided to stick with the 1k x 1k version for the final, even though it shows some less-than-pleasant aliasing on the text.

To fix #1, I'll have to look over my code before the next Challenge. For #2, I think that I'm going to have to place coordinate systems on a firmer footing - this might mean explicitly grounding everything geodesically, or handling more chaotic systems (like the rivers) at multiple scales at once.

Anyways, this was fun. Hopefully next month's Challenge will be something equally nice to sink my teeth into.

[waldronate]

From 1kx1k to 4kx4k and the rendering speed goes from 5 minutes to 240 minutes? That's about a 50x increase in time for 16x the number of pixels. Processes like river finding and random Poisson fill aren't exactly linear in scaling so that's not too bad.

I would recommend using a slightly smaller font on the map description. It looks very cramped in there.

[Steel General]

I agree with Waldronate... reduce the font size and maybe even put it in its own little 'box' rather than expanding the border.

[gilgamec]

From 1kx1k to 4kx4k and the rendering speed goes from 5 minutes to 240 minutes? That's about a 50x increase in time for 16x the number of pixels. Processes like river finding and random Poisson fill aren't exactly linear in scaling so that's not too bad.

It's not quite as good as it sounds. A lot of my processes are linear; they take up quite a bit of the 5 minutes but very little of the four hours. The most time-consuming part of the 1k x 1k run is calculating the initial coastline which (for legacy reasons) I was never able to optimize away; it's linear and goes from about two minutes to just under an hour. The Poisson fill places the same number of trees at any resolution, so it's linear (and only a fraction of a second in any case). The basin-filling is slowed down the most by far. I do two passes, as recommended in one of your Wilbur tutorials, the first taking more time; at 1k x 1k, the longer of the two takes about twenty seconds, but at 4k x 4k, it's over two hours. (Basin fill should be about cubic in linear resolution, or about 64x for this increase, not 320x.)

[gilgamec]

Looks like I got in before the contest closed. As suggested above, I've reduced the size of the text in the cartouche. There's probably all sorts of other tweaks I could make, but I think I'll leave it at this.

Thanks again to everyone who offered praise and criticism. This map isn't quite of the level of the others in the Challenge, but it'll certainly not be my last.

[Immolate]

I love the simple style of this map, with hints of sophistication (the mountains!) lurking here and there. When the task at hand is presenting information clearly and deliberately, this map gets it done very well. Good job!