Traveller - random world generator, work in progress

[isomage]

Well, it's currently only making PDF -- I'm converting it for easy display here. I guess in the end anything's possible. Being only a single page, unlike the subsector maps, it would be pretty simple.

The PDFs can be loaded into inkscape, however, and have the advantage of not having a fixed resolution.

[Turgenev]

Ooooh, I'll be keeping an eye on this thread. Great work so far.

[isomage]

I haven't been able to work on this for a few days, but I'll be getting back into it soon.

I'm interested in what you guys would expect from a "Traveller World Map Generator" in terms of map appearance. The obvious UPP stats to work from would be size, hydrography, atmosphere, and possibly population (for city density, if the generator will place cities). Hydrography gives us a spectrum from desert world to water world and various ocean percentages in between, and atmosphere would affect vegetation, but even on those two axes the setting allows for so much variation that representation could be problematic. If I used little pine trees to represent thick vegetation, then it wouldn't seem very alien, so perhaps simple color-coding of hexes would be best. But then should all desert worlds be brown, all seas be blue, and all vegetation green? If not, then so much for an easily understood coloring convention.

Any suggestions?

[BeRKA]

You need to place a starport on the map as well.

Other inputs can be different colored seas (and land) for atm >= A and for atm <= 1.

The color of the photosynthetic pigment (for plants) can vary depending on the star color:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_pigment

At first one color for a hex is fine, but I hope that future versions will include some kind of fractal terrain.

[icosahedron]

Great idea Isomage. I can see me using this. Repped. Maybe you need to be more abstract to represent alien terrain. Simple things like your triangle for mountains, a scribble blob for vegetation, the traditional 3 stalks for swamps, a couple of dunes for desert...

Alien colour can be a problem. Again, I'd go with simplistic representation (though I'm probably in the minority here amongst the artistic types) with maybe just two or three colours, khaki for land, bluish-purple for 'sea' and maybe a greyish-brown for arid/barren areas.
Just my two credits.

[isomage]

At first one color for a hex is fine, but I hope that future versions will include some kind of fractal terrain.

The maps are actually fractal terrain already (just low-resolution fractal terrain) The program samples 3D noise at points on the surface of the icosahedron, with high values being rendered as mountains, middling values as flat land, and low values as sea. More noise is used to determine vegetation distribution (the light and dark green patches).

I'll only be putting a single terrain icon in each hex, and it should be viewed as the predominant type within the hex, not as the exclusive type. If we were to zoom in, subdividing each hex into several smaller ones, we would find that a coastal land hex would actually contain a number of land and sea hexes, and any of the new, smaller, coastal land hexes could similarly be subdivided, and so on. The map at the resolution given is just a high-level overview, and any individual hexes would need to be mapped in detail by the GM if players were to do any serious exploring.

For example, here's the same patch of terrain rendered at successively higher resolutions with my random wilderness map generator. At each step, each hex is replaced by four smaller ones, and the process could go on forever, adding ever more detail.

[isomage]

The color of the photosynthetic pigment (for plants) can vary depending on the star color:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_pigment

That's interesting, thanks. I guess I could have a range of colors for plants (and another range for seas, another for soil, and so on)

[isomage]

Alien colour can be a problem. Again, I'd go with simplistic representation (though I'm probably in the minority here amongst the artistic types) with maybe just two or three colours, khaki for land, bluish-purple for 'sea' and maybe a greyish-brown for arid/barren areas.
Just my two credits.

Good suggestions. The off-color sea is a good idea -- it could be blue enough to represent Earthlike oceans, but still different enough to encompass all sorts of alien types.

[thomryng]

Sorry to resurrect a dead thread, but did you ever get the UPP input on this working?

cheers,

thom

[AHawk]

its awesome!, so did you get it to accept UPPs, yet?