WIP- FT Script development

[Master TMO]

Just experimenting, I swapped the order of the commands, running an Incise Flow first, then Smooth Offset 2, then the Fill Basins. Most of the lakes disappeared, but there are still a bunch of much smaller lakes around the edge.

[Master TMO]

Innnnteresting... if I Smooth by 2 after the Fill Basins all those lakes come back again.

[Master TMO]

I tried Deterracing the Offset layer. It got rid of the tiny lakes around the edges of the basin fills, but poked a brand new lake where none had been before, one deep enough to drop below the continental shelving.

Mind you, Deterrace doesn't appear to have a script command, so it wouldn't be an ideal solution, since I'm trying to automate, not add more manual.

[Master TMO]

The sloping water thing should be remedied by putting a 0 for the slope on the basin fill part of the operation. Setting the value to 0 will give flat lakes, but FT can't route rivers across perfectly flat terrain.

Zig-zagging a bit, I tried running a script with a 0 param after the Fill Basins as Lakes and it aborted.

[Master TMO]

There are some days you just gotta cackle like a Mad Scientist. This is one of those days for me.

Attached is a FTPro script that will process your world and create 8 selection files:

• Land: All pixels with Altitude > 0
• Water: All pixels with Altitude <=0 (inverse of Land)
• Continents: All pixels with Altitude > -1000 (assuming that's where your continental shelves are at)
• Seafloor: All pixels with Altitude <= -1000 (inverse of Continents)
• Lakes: All water pixels (Altitude <= 0) that are completely landlocked
• Oceans: All non-landlocked water pixels
• Landmass: All Land pixels + Lakes
• Shelves: the Continental Shelves

I've also attached 3 of the selection files as samples.

To use the script, uncompress it into your Scripts folder. You will need to create a folder where FT can save the selection files. The file path to this folder can NOT include any spaces. Edit the script file (Create_Selections.fsr) and do a global replace on c:/mapping/selections and replace it with your file path, then save.

That should be all it takes to be able to use the script. Fair warning, this is not a fast script. It will take a while to run to completion, so be patient.

Once it's done, you can use the selections for various things, some of which I will address later in this thread (like getting rid of all those lakes!). If you make changes to your map that alters the outline somehow, you can always run this script again, and it will overwrite your old selection files with new ones.

Enjoy!!

[Ascension]

Beyond my capability to understand programming but my hat's off to you, my man. Keep up the great work (from one mad scientist to another).

[Master TMO]

Well, my primary goal of it was to get the two selections Shelves and Lakes as separate selections. If you select all terrain between altitude -1000 and 0, you have no way of telling if it's a continental shelf, or a section of landlocked water that goes below sea level. It's a personal thing, but two of the things I first want to change with each of my maps is that the continental shelves are too wide if you compare them to Earth's, and that finding and filling all those basins around the map by hand is tedious. Hopefully with these, I can do that. Getting there is a bit of a brute force, but that's all that was available to me.

[Master TMO]

It's taken me over a day to get to the next stage. Attached is a script for filling in those sub-sealevel lakes. It is not 100% perfect, but pretty close. About 98%, I'd say. However, if you run the Create Selections script again, you can use the Lakes selection to find what is left and fix manually, or run Fill Lakes again. You do have to run Create Selections again first though, to get a correct Lakes selection.

[Master TMO]

Oh, I should mention, I would advise doing any large-scale modifications to your world before running these scripts. While the scripts will handle landlocked below sealevel areas, it will not do anything about places where they dip below the continental shelf. So if you have any of those you don't want, fill them in with prescale editing first. Once you get it all above the shelf boundary, the scripts will fill it in.

[Master TMO]

I don't think I like the way the Fill_Lakes script works at the moment, but I don't have anything better to replace it yet. Right now I'm playing around with the settings for generating new worlds, in case that other shared world project calls, but it also will give me a bunch of worlds to test scripts on in the future. So this thread isn't dead, merely sidelined for a bit.