Map 34 - The Eastern Reaches of Khaluk

[Carnifex]

Thanks, I have tried to textually describe this process a few times so this gave me an opportunity to get some pictures of the stages and now I can just refer people to this post in future. It has come up a lot in the past and I did quite of few of these.


Your welcome to steal the map or height map as a basis for your section if it helps you. But I cant go through the process of doing the contours again if I missed a bit.


I should also like to mention that the standard appareil of the Khalukians is a very tight fitting fully encompasing plate steel helmet with double buckled under chin strap. Most difficult to chew through ! Additionally, a declaration has been made this day that any dwarf seen on the western border will be subject to a short maths exam and those that dont pass shall be executed on the spot. Those living dwarves that skipped math class and dont add up good had better start doing extra home work.

I should look at my neighbours and see what the land form looks like. I just stuck in those mountains in those positions just to get the process running. I think the mountain ranges are a bit fat and need to be modified but its all script based so I can move them pretty easily. I may have to write some special brainless dwarf sub routines to my script if theres some unnatural terraforming going on !

Ok - so this is what it looks like around me.

I am really looking forward seeing the maps coming together.

[Redrobes]

Been running it up for a while and found a way to get rid of some of the lakes but it leaves these ridges in the landscape. I may try to fix that up but I doubt it. The lighting on this render is poor and I probably will fix that so theres likely to be some more work with labels etc but for now it will have to do.

### Latest WIP ###

[Redrobes]

Very impressive work on the 3D! The way you did the waters and coasts are excellent as well.

These are really nice, I like the way plan view's transition from forest to mountain, really nice feel.

Thanks, both of water, coast, and mountain colour is done by the shader. What happens is that the terrain simulator exports a number of images as parameters. These are the height the water but also the temperature, the gradient, sediment, flow - a whole bunch of stuff. Then I run that through a programmable shader and that says things like, if its just above the sea level then shade it with sand, a bit higher and it has vegetation then put down trees, below the water line we have sea. There are about 50 of those rules and textures so we have sea weed, wet sand, dry sand, sand dunes, right up to moorland, rock, snow and some other odd ones. So I can change the whole look of the map by changing the shader rules and textures but I dont have to draw the colour in by hand at all. So like I said at the top, doing 3D is more work up front but a whole lot less now that I have it.

You may have seen http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/nov...g-and-erosion/ - written in WebGL and runs in your browser. It made me both sad and happy to see it back when.

The simplest way to release something like that to open source is to put a specific "this software is abandoned; do not contact me about it" notification on the download (and/or point the notification system at an abandoned/ignored e-mail address). I used to get pestered about source code for Wilbur a couple of times a day. That almost entirely stopped when I put the "source not available" notification on the page.

I think I had seen that link but its been ages since I ran it. Running it is not too impressive but I think the code and the fact its done in GL shaders is pretty cool. His explaination of how he is doing it nearly matches up with my way. Were both adding rain and then trying to level out the water and the amount of water transferred across pixels forces different amounts of erosion and the amount of eroded material is taken up as sediment which is then dropped out depening on flow rates. I am also tracking temperature and vegetation and a couple of other things but thats essentially how mine works.

I guess it could be released but its not something I have any plans for. If I can ever get this working on the GPU and can find a set of pareters that make for nice terrains given a guided input then I would probably release it as a black box and put a GUI on it to make these terrains. No plans to do that job tho as it would be hard work.

I am really looking forward seeing the maps coming together.

Oh yeah me too. I do have a particular liking and enthusiasm of these community projects. My mapping app was designed to bring a lot of maps of differing resolutions and styles together so since I have it I have historically done the CWBP overall maps. I think ill probably do this guild world as well. Its nice to zoom into the individual maps at full res and then maybe people will also map some of the cities within them too. If you have not seen my infamous "horses ass" vid on you tube then check out... (Edit: I got that wrong you need to look here instead). That was my old section within the first CWBP we all did. Also I rather like the beach on that Galtini Island - thats what it would look like with the shader if run up close enough.

[Redrobes]

I redid the mountain masks to match up with my neighbours mountains.

Since then I have been running the world sim with all its tedious rain settings and so on. Only when I use my program do I remember why I don't release it.... Anyway, after a pitched battle with it I have some semblance of settings that dont suck. The problem with artificial height mapped data is that it was never made during the process of erosion and so on so it always generates loads of local water troughs. There is some settings to get around this but the proper way to do it takes so long to run I cant be bothered. So for now here is where its at and maybe ill faff with it some more yet and maybe let it chug for many hours over the w/e and see what it comes up with.

It has started putting some beaches in now and I can just about make out the waves on the shore but at this scale they are a single pixel wide. This wip is scaled down from the full sized run too so you may not see anything that suggests they are there.

Edit: Also a gratuitous 3D view where you can see a better view of the beaches.
Edit2: Ok, rendered out the texture at higher res and cut out the beach. Thats better !

### Latest WIP ###

[waldronate]

...it always generates loads of local water troughs.

The impatient among us start out with a basin fill step and then punch back in the lakes that are important.

[snodsy]

These are really nice, I like the way plan view's transition from forest to mountain, really nice feel.

[J.Edward]

I love that 3d view. Really lets you feel like you're in the space.

[Redrobes]

I love that 3d view. Really lets you feel like you're in the space.

This is looking fantastic. I really love the 3d stuff you are doing here. Watching it progress has been a real treat. Thank you for that.

Yeah, this is really cool, I love 3D maps, very immersive!

Thanks ! Yeah I like the 3D view too. I am always amazed at the talent of the artists on these boards and I dont have the patience to hand draw it so I do cheat a lot with the procedural generation, and all my maps look the same because of it. But when I used to DM I did a lot of visuals to help the feel. It was quite cool to have the ability to view the landscape as you might be able to see it. So for me I like to have it in 3D and I also like to be able to get in close on the maps and so procedural gets you that.

If anyone is interested in seeing a bit more I believe there are a couple of youtube vids out there. I think the MeDem site is down now and they were on there. Oh yeah here they are on Monks YT page: https://www.youtube.com/user/monkschain

The impatient among us start out with a basin fill step and then punch back in the lakes that are important.

You are so right. When we did MeDem, Monks took the terrain he draw with a pen in vector then before I even saw it he ran it through wilbur for that specific purpose. I do have some fill options but instead of doing it like you do with a depression search and fill I let the water in and create sediment which fills up the ponds till they overflow but it will take a while for that to run. I might have a go with that and see what happens. It will probably alter the shape of the landscape a bit tho and I am not sure I can do that this time. I find it a lot easier to start with something vague and let the app determine what final shape it runs to and where the rivers go. Its hard work going from the final border shape and placed rivers back to 3D.

Monks and I always used to say that it would be best to "model in the rain" where you let the erosion and river formation happen whilst you pull up the landscape and then let the water do its thing for a while before altering it some more. But we know how much compute that would take. Possible, esp now with all the GPU grunt, but a lot of work to get that going.

I have wondered more recently if this new burst of AI development like with the TensorFlow could be trained to place rivers and stuff based on the height map or better yet in reverse where it could guess the height map from the river flow. You have a planet sized pile of training data from the real world to go on. Also wondered if similar kind of thing could be done for placing buildings in cities. I dont have the fire in my belly to devote myself to that any more.

You really need to just release it. Maybe even open source it. Lol

Hah yeah, but then I would spend the rest of my days replying to people as to why they churn out deserts all day long and nothing grows in their land. I'd be a slave to it. My program is so hard to use that once, when I got really ****ed with it, I fired up the code debugger and had to break point on it to look at what the hell was going on cos I had some parameters out of whack. Its a nightmare to use. Seriously bad. Its all text based scripty stuff with no UI at all. Its about as easy to use as cracking a safe. The texture shader is quite cool tho. Although thats also text based its not so bad and I like that a lot. But even then, Monks tried it and found it hard work. I write useful programs that nobody but me can use !

I did release for free the 3D viewer which is what I use and what that image was done with. I think most of us oldies know about it but if your new then you can get it. You need a height map (bitmap BMP file or HF2 file) and some colour map for it. But its still online here: http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/cgi-bin/vi...dragons_flight

[waldronate]

Monks and I always used to say that it would be best to "model in the rain" where you let the erosion and river formation happen whilst you pull up the landscape and then let the water do its thing for a while before altering it some more. But we know how much compute that would take. Possible, esp now with all the GPU grunt, but a lot of work to get that going.

You may have seen http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/nov...g-and-erosion/ - written in WebGL and runs in your browser. It made me both sad and happy to see it back when.

The simplest way to release something like that to open source is to put a specific "this software is abandoned; do not contact me about it" notification on the download (and/or point the notification system at an abandoned/ignored e-mail address). I used to get pestered about source code for Wilbur a couple of times a day. That almost entirely stopped when I put the "source not available" notification on the page.

[Tonnichiwa]

This is looking fantastic. I really love the 3d stuff you are doing here. Watching it progress has been a real treat. Thank you for that.