Mapping with Pascal

[castlewrks]

Or this can be titled "One World, One Random number sequence".

The world of Metaphaze II: Avalon began as a MapMaker map that grew and grew and grew, but wasn't able to generate the detail maps I needed for my world.

The first rendition of a programmed world came about through using Javascript and a 1/0 bitmap of the country maps. The JavaScript generated all the terrain, the rivers and regions. It worked very well for each country, but failed in blending the edges of each country into the adjacent ones. Moving to a world map, JavaScript just plain bogged down taking really long times to do basic things like loading the 1/0 bitmap. The first two attached maps show what this looked like.

So, along came Pascal, something I learned back in college and that I could find a cool compiler online. So, recoding all my routines into Pascal, I generated an entire world's rivers, counties, districts, regions in a fraction of the time it takes JavaScript to load.

The maps that come out are quite detailed... I've attached some samples for one of the countries. The last three attached maps show the green country map overlaid with the rivers generated, a county map and a district map.

One of the interesting facets of creating maps this way is you don't realize the detail that comes about when you show how every cell drains via its rivers. I added a sliding scale to eliminate some of these tributaries to clear up the map.

The second thing you realize is that when people create a rudimentary RPG world, it is highly generalized. My first run of my program creating rivers resulted in over 1 million river names. Likewise, with 75 countries, there were over 90,000 counties, almost 10,000 districts and 3,000 regions. The original 1/0 map was exploded from a 180x600 map where each cell was 25x25 kms to a map 1,800x6,000 containing 10 million cells, each 2.5x2.5 kms in size.

The goal of this project is to generate via code everything from the world, all the way down to the different details in each location....

World
-Country
-- Regions
--- Districts
---- Counties
----- Cities, towns, villages, castles, temples, churches, ruins, and dungeons.

When completed, the estimate is a web-site with more than 250,000 maps and more than 1 million pages.

Comments?