WIP- FT Script development

[Master TMO]

I am working on enhancing the world-processing script. My goal is to have the script do a large list of processing to a fresh world, so that I only have to spend my precious brain energies on custom artsy changes and not on rote bulk updates.

I was wondering if I could some critiquing on the post-processed world. Feel free to critique anything that doesn't look quite right to you. Many of you know a *lot* more about what is and isn't realistic geography.

The script does not currently do craters or volcanic hotspots. It does try to do glaciation. The original world is a raw FT world.

My goal is to take the critiques and try to add more script commands to include them.

The original world files are attached in this message.

The images are:
* Image climate
* Rainfall (brighter blue = more rainfall)
* Temperature
* Bump map

[Master TMO]

Here are the post-processing images. Nothing on these maps is hand-edited.

Any and all critiques or feedback is welcome. Not sure why the system didn't create thumbnails of some of the maps.

It's kind of odd that no deserts got created. I may need to modify the continental drying portion of the script. It's possible that the only reason deserts have shown up in my previous map is because the continent was flipping HUGE (covered most of a hemisphere). If so, then I'll have to up the drying factor to compensate.

[Master TMO]

Here are the general script steps:
* Fill Basins
* Shrink the continental shelves slightly
* Smooth Prescale Offset
* Incise Flow the entire world
* Fill Basins
* Smooth Offset
* Select all terrain <40 degrees F
* Incise flow just the selected area, to try and replicate glaciation
* Lower rainfall around the horse latitudes by 20", and raise the avg temp by 10 degrees
* Raise the rainfall elsewhere by 20"
* Select all landmasses, drop rainfall by 1" per 10 pixels in.

Pretty much none of these are new - I've discussed them elsewhere in the forums. I'm putting them all into a single project to see how realistic they are and if there's anything more I can add to it.

[waldronate]

Incise Flow has the feature that it will make little basins around the junctions of rivers. I recommend a fill basins immediately following any Incise Flow step. For best effects, I also recommend at least a 4096 editing resolution any time that you plan to use incise flow because the visible effects are very dependent on editing resolution.

[Master TMO]

I use a 4096 resolution. I had not filled basins after the last incise flow on the thinking that they were too new to really be eroded. I was planning on figuring a way to fill them with water. I know FT has the Fill Basins with Lakes feature, but I haven't played with it much lately, and an earlier model of the software seemed to fill the lakes with a sloping water table, which looks alright from a distance, but if you start looking at it in detail, the elevation of the water at one end of the lake could be 100 feet higher than the water level at the other end.

What is the feature that makes basins around the river junctions? I haven't knowingly stumbled across that one yet.

Thanks for the response!

[waldronate]

Feature, bug, they are all a matter of opinion. The way that incise flow works means that applying a blur to the basic flow pattern will result in the contribution of multiple rivers to points near the join. This excess of altitude removal manifests as little bowls around the joins. It often isn't noticed, but it's there.

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. I added the little bit of slope to computations to make everything work visually well. Another unfortunate consequence of the way that FT's river routing works manifests as an automatic basin fill as part of the river routing operation. This automatic basin fill can (and usually does) result in many very straight river segments that head through the air over valleys. The fill basins and smoothing operations should result in removal of the really concave valleys. Sometimes it doesn't work as well as it should. In an ideal world, the atomic elements that are part of the river routing operation would be scriptable, but they aren't.

[Master TMO]

Well, the two Incise Flows I use are as follows:

General Whole World: (modified from the one given in the FT tutorial)
// Tool Incise_flow blur  amount   exponent   effectblend
Tool Incise_flow     1.5    1.5       0.4         0.5


Glaciation Incise Flow: 
// Tool Incise_flow blur   amount   exponent   effectblend
Tool Incise_flow     1.0    0.5       0.2         1.0

From the notes I've found searching the forums, having a lower Exponent value means it follows more riverbeds. So the Glaciation Incise carves more channels, but not as deep, and (theoretically at any rate) less blurred and more sharply defined.

And I don't see anything that allows me to enter a slope for the Basin Fill operations. When I run them from the menus it just processes immediately. And the Script Info file doesn't list any parameters for the commands.

Tool Fill_basins
fill the basins in the surface in the offset channel at the current editing resolution.

Tool Fill_lakes
fill the basins in the surface in the water channel at the current editing resolution.

[Master TMO]

I found what may have been a minor glitch - the base map did not have Prescale editing enabled, so the steps that used it probably didn't happen. I'm re-running the script now just to see what it looks like. I think I'm also going to double the amount of continental drying. Rather than drop it 1" per 10 pixels, I'll drop it every 5 pixels.

I know that central valley around the lake has incorrect rainfall - it's entirely surrounded by mountains, and would most likely be in a permanent rainshadow. But I haven't figured out a way of automatically calculating rainshadows, so fixing that would be a manual process, and that's not what I'm aiming for with this project. I'm trying to build up a complete automatic script that I would run before doing any hand-editing. Now, if anybody knows of a way to automatically figure out rainshadows or wind/ocean currents, that would be completely different....

[ravells]

This is all way over my head. But I hope when you're done you create something which all of us non programmer types can use with FT!

[Master TMO]

O_O ...


You mean I have to share????

P