My first map, and it'll be a doozie.

[Jykke]

I have to ask this, as it actually helps me when doing the next map of mine.. is it normal for the rivers be that much carved into the terrain? This question was for Redrobes

[Redrobes]

I have to ask this, as it actually helps me when doing the next map of mine.. is it normal for the rivers be that much carved into the terrain? This question was for Redrobes

Maybe, kinda, probably not.

I was messing about so didn't have time to do it properly. Even if I did then some of them I would have wanted to cut in deep. In reality most of the gouges from the terrain are done by glaciers or by the mountains rising up slowly and the water cuts them away and there's other factors going on where softer rocks crack up and fall down to form scree slopes and so on. I turned some of these features on but when the mountains are miles high then its a bit off having scree slopes miles high too. All the apps I know which erode with water (including mine) cut much deeper channels than they ought. Its a problem in that you want to cut valleys out of hills but only want a little stream at the bottom to do it. Like the Grand Canyon, the water flowing seems so trivial to cut such a huge event. But in all numerical apps (and I haven't seen anyone try to do this algebraically yet) water has a finite viscosity, you cant move it about fast enough to model real water. So the channels have to be artificially deep to contain it. To do a better job id smooth the terrain out a bit each pass but that would have changed the edge shape. People generally want to keep the map shape but have all the rivers fixed up for it. Running terrain apps with river erosion would change the terrain by shuffling rock from mountains into sediment and depositing it in the low lands creating new coast line.

You will see loads of water spots on my map too - that's another 'feature' id like to get more of a grip on too. I have a permeability factor which makes water soak into the ground. You can see that on one of the movies on its web site. But that's hard to control in my app (what isn't...) and I could not be bothered to get it just right so I left them in.