Saturday, September 19, 2015

A Slicker Presentation

With the bulk of the terrain generation under my belt, I spent some time working on the visual presentation of the hex map.  I feel that the maps were looking too clunky and cluttered, with too many terrain icons.  Since I had a fully detailed elevation map at my disposal, why not use that to create nice looking gradient terrain hexes, rather than relying on terrain icons to represent everything?  I kept terrain icons for areas of high mountains and heavy forests, but the nice gradient of hex colors now presents a pleasing aesthetic to the map.

Oh, I also cleaned up river generation a bit more.  My prior algo was producing some truly crazy and maze like rivers.  While they looked interesting, they were decidedly not natural looking.  This algo uses the previous one to determine an ultimate destination for the river, but then lets the river move naturally toward that destination, while introducing some subtle, meandering variations.

I'm starting to collect my thoughts on the next steps, which will involve placing cultures and their artifacts (settlements, dungeons, ruins, etc) on the map!

3 comments:

  1. I just came across these and they are looking EXCELLENT. I have, for many years, been looking for more in the way of generating world maps taking into account elevation and biomes, with very little luck. It seems you have something almost usable. Is this going to be available anytime? Heck, I'd pay for it based on what I'm seeing. I've had to use FractalTerrains by ProFantasy to generate all the maps, but they were never hex specific and I could never get down to the detail I wanted.

    My end goal was something that would allow me to generate the 3000 or more worlds in the Battletech universe and allow gaming across them, but algorithms in regards to terrain just seems to kick my mental butt.

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  2. I'm working on this again, just converted everything to Javascript and will work on a page where you'll be able to use these tools to quickly spin up new world maps.

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    1. Awesome. What if I wanted to spin up 3000 maps though, any way to quickly do that? :) I do stuff in .NET, and will probably be releasing a VERY simple DirectX7 engine in .NET for beginners soon. Not liking the way hobby level game development has pretty much completely vanished the last 10 years :( (and no, don't say Unity, its garbage).

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