Rainfall/Climate "plug ins"?

[Wil]

I'm wondering if there are any tools out there that will take a file exported from Fractal Terrains Pro and regenerate rainfall and climate data. The rainfall from FTPro is very uniform (which I realize is a known issue), and I just kind of want to know what options are out there. Thanks.

[ravells]

Not as far as I know, Wil, but Joe Slayton, who wrote Fractal Terrains is a member of these forums, so if anyone would know, he would. Welcome to the Guild, by the way!

[Wil]

Not as far as I know, Wil, but Joe Slayton, who wrote Fractal Terrains is a member of these forums, so if anyone would know, he would. Welcome to the Guild, by the way!

Thanks. This is probably the wrong subforum for this I just realized. Anyway, I have Wilbur and have already imported my map into it and done some operations (this was before I realized I hadn't updated FTPro and that's why I couldn't find functions like Incise Flow that Joe's tutorial talked about). I've also changed some mountain ranges, done various fills, smooths, etc. so I'm sure that the rainfall would have changed somewhat from when FTPro first generated the map. What I think I'm going to do is try to export the map out of FTPro in one of the height map formats (MDR maybe? I'm not familiar enough yet) and then recreate the world from that map. That should reset the rainfall and climates, after which I've found some good sites on worldbuilding that I can use to tweak things a bit.

[alaskanflyboy]

Have you tried playing much with the options in Fractal Terrains? I've been continuously toying with them to find a decent result, trying to find what base settings and randomizer settings make the more convincing result. I got it to make something more sporadic once but forgot - like an idiot - to write down the parameters before trying a new set. Of course, I keep meaning to ask Joe Slayton about how exactly the random value comes into play. I don't know if it's like setting the average base temperature and then the randomizer is creating a range both negative and positive, or if it's only negative or positive.

[Badger]

You can usually get an answer to your software questions pretty quick in that forum http://www.cartographersguild.com/forumdisplay.php?f=46

Sometimes software questions like that will get missed if they are in a wip thread or posted in the middle of a discussion thread. I'd answer your question if I were actually smart enough to do so...

[waldronate]

Thanks. This is probably the wrong subforum for this I just realized. Anyway, I have Wilbur and have already imported my map into it and done some operations (this was before I realized I hadn't updated FTPro and that's why I couldn't find functions like Incise Flow that Joe's tutorial talked about). I've also changed some mountain ranges, done various fills, smooths, etc. so I'm sure that the rainfall would have changed somewhat from when FTPro first generated the map. What I think I'm going to do is try to export the map out of FTPro in one of the height map formats (MDR maybe? I'm not familiar enough yet) and then recreate the world from that map. That should reset the rainfall and climates, after which I've found some good sites on worldbuilding that I can use to tweak things a bit.

FT adjusts the computed climate map as you edit the world. FT lacks basic features for its terrain model such as heat and water transport across the world face, giving rather idiosyncratic local conditions.

I wouldn't recommend exporting the map from FT unless you have a very good reason because recreating it in FT is likely to yield pretty much the same results for climate. Learn about reasonable placements for climate types and use the editing tools to adjust temperature and rainfall to get what you're after. And praying for better modeling in a future FT revision wouldn't hurt, either.