Hello

[fvirexi]

Hello.

I've been looking at your maps for inspiration quite a few times, so I figured I should make a user and perhaps share something back.
Aside from looking at well-made maps, my interest in cartography is mainly within the realms of programming. That is, every once in a while I have some great fun toying around with creating map generators.

The day was spent making this
While I'm not completely satisfied with the colors, I like the end result enough to show you.

My goal was originally to create a terrain with mountain ranges and cliffs, something which most continuous noise based generators lack. First I thought of simulating plate tectonics, but after finding and reading laurimann's interesting thesis and playing with his demo, I felt the procedure was too time-consuming for my purposes. Trying to find a way to emulate real-life terrain with simplex noise, I eventually stumbled upon an interesting effect: piping a fractional brown motion space into itself as an added dimension! Given a 4D FBM f, compute the height like f(x,y,z,f(x,y,z,...)). In this program I "pipe" the noise once, but two or three times gives more more cliffs and more mountain ranges at a cost of computation and more swirly distortion.


Quick note about the controls:

RENDER renders with previous noise, SEED/RENDER renders with new noise
canvas->scale is a logarithmic scaling of the size, 512->1024->2048->...
canvas->steps_in_one size of chunks computed at once
general->piping reduces the smudgy distortion (0 is regular simplex noise fbm)
color->more->shadow adjust the amount of shading.

Not sure if this program is of any use to anybody, but I thought it could serve as a simple base map to be modified or maybe as inspiration.

What do you think?
- Fvirexi.

Note: If you want to see the map on a sphere, just save it and add it as an image overlay in Google Earth

[Chick]

Hello fvirexi, welcome to the Guild!

[Eilathen]

Hi fvirexi,

Welcome to the CG, the mapiest place on the internet
I for one think your tool is really cool. I already made some maps and saved them (comes in real handy if you want to have some planetary global maps for an hopefully upcoming Sci Fi RPG!). So thanks! I really hope you'll keep this online for future uses.
Have some Rep.!

[fvirexi]

Glad you like it.
If you need increased resolution of an area without increasing the size of the map, try to modify the canvas->zoom,west,north parameters.
I might make some changes every once in a while, so if you want to retain the exact version I have out now, feel free to download it and run it locally. It's javascript, so just open the downloaded webpage in a browser.

The next time I have a long stretch of free time available, I would love to expand the generator: calculating stable wind and ocean currents, rainfall and rivers, and finally from a few colonies spreading cities and nations, with culture vectors and relationships (using the ocean currents for transportation, of course) that may conquer and expand and... well... I might be in over my head