side-project

[Tom]

Something I'm currently doing just because it interests me:




100% automatically generated, the only manual work was adding a bit of noise in photoshop so it doesn't look so clean.

This is actually a scaled-down version. What you can't see is that there are actually around 6000 plots of land on this map, individually generated and computed. With the generated data, I could store those plots in a database. Imagine having 6000 BM regions... Oh yes, I also store height data at a fairly high resolution (about 30k points), so this could easily be turned into a 3D map.

I'm still tweaking the river-generation algorithm, but I am very, very happy with my result so far.

[Zakilevo]

wow 6000 regions. We will probably need every single character to fill the map.

But the map itself doesn't look bad at all.

[Anaris]

The next step is to have settlements placed in sensible and/or game-appropriate ways.  Like not having nearly every single stronghold in the game sitting out in the middle of nowhere ;D

It sounds like the 6000 plots could be used to build complex subregions; if we were to make a continent out of a map like this, and made it, say, twice the size of Dwilight, each region could have, on average, 12 subregions. Lords could then take those subregions and divvy them up into estates.

(Or we could try and implement that BM 2.0 idea you had, where you start out at the subregion level, and agglomerate subregions together arbitrarily to make regions...but that's probably impractical ;D )

[Foundation]

Oh the huge manatee!

[Perth]

Drooling over the idea of this as a BM continent.

[Zakilevo]

Drooling over the idea of this as a BM continent.

It will certainly be better than having copies of EC and Atamara.

[Tom]

Sorry to burst it, but this is a side-project, it's not for BM. Sorry.

[Zakilevo]

Aww... :( Too bad. That map would have made me giggle for days.

[Chenier]

Seems like a good tool for RPGs like D&D.

[De-Legro]

Seems like a good tool for RPGs like D&D.

There already exists tons of map generation software for RPG games.

[Penchant]

Sorry to burst it, but this is a side-project, it's not for BM. Sorry.

If its not for BM, what is it for? I am just curious.

[Perth]

Sorry to burst it, but this is a side-project, it's not for BM. Sorry.

Why not!

[Tom]

Why not!

Because even though it eats my time like nothing else, my life does not revolve around BM and I do other things, too.

[Tom]

Here's another island from my current version, slightly improved river generation and added a coastline:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9638874/voronoi-936002642.png

This is full-size (2048x2048 pixels) with the region centers marked (these would be villages, mills, towns, strongholds, etc) just to show how many there are (5458 in this one, to be precise).


Next thing I'm thinking about is adding moisture calculations so I can generate terrain types (the current one might look nice, but it's basically just a heightmap). A lot of inspirations are from http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/ - but I didn't use any of his code.

[Chenier]

There already exists tons of map generation software for RPG games.

True, but by the looks and sounds of what he's doing, it sounds like I could manipulate it with my GIS software for nice results. ^.^