Anyone remember Dwarf Fortress?

[Javert]

This came as a surprise to me. For years I've known about the map-making capabilities of Dwarf Fortress and the surprisingly detailed histories and cartographies it produces. But I have always written it off as a viable map-making tool because of the ASCII characters it uses as a graphics pack.

No longer.

I have discovered that Dwarf Fortress creates some of the most realistic randomly generated maps I have found to date, including rainfall, temperature, vegetation, elevation and so forth. With one or two tweaks in Gimp or Photoshop, you can get something very basic but very promising. Like this.



They also have a neat biome and site map that you can get which maps out biomes (forests, prairies, mountains and such), procedurally generated sites (meaning that each group grew and evolved over a period of time building strategic cities as they went), and other things in a readable format. But it isn't that guild-worthy. Right now, I am trying to turn this map into a nicer political one using their system. Which should be fun.

But has anyone else found this unique tool? Or anything else about this deepening program I should know about?

[VincentAlliath]

I get frustrated with Dwarf Fortress... it's too complicated for me and I'm impatient.

My major problem with the worlds it creates (however realistic) is very obvious in that map there. I don't like massive landmasses being joined together like that. It's just an aesthetics thing for me. Individually, though, all of those landmasses would look brilliant. Through editing, you can fix it and remove them from each other, but Dwarf Fortress should know better!

Brilliant game is brilliant, though. I just wish I had the patience to learn it.

[Redrobes]

We had some posts about it. It was news to me over here too. I think this is something that it was quite easy to miss tho for some it was a big deal. I have a thread called mapping using economics which is my attempt at making a map by iteratively running an AI simulation of what people might do to maximize their wealth and health. It was brought up in that thread and there has been at least one more about it too.

Theres other methods of generating procedural terrain from various sources. We have had photos of rust patches and clouds and other noise sources as well as the more traditional perlin noise generators.

Edit -- oh 1st post - Welcome to the guild and thanks for posting !

Your land mass render is nice - are you able to post a greyscale height map generated from a DF run.

[Javert]

Well its very rough but here's what comes out. It's workable.



And is it really? Huh. I guess it's about time

[Gandwarf]

I have been playing Minecraft a lot, a game somewhat like Dwarf Fortress, but with a 3D interface. The community has released some great mapping tools. This is a map made of my Minecraft world.

[Ascension]

That's pretty cool, GD.

[Javert]

Wow that is sweet. They have some pretty neat visualisers for DF, but nothing like that