Wilbur Question

[Greason Wolfe]

For those in the know (perhaps Torq or Waldonrate), I was curious to know if, when FTPro saves a file in the Special MDR format, if rainfall data is passed on for the purposes of Wilbur calculating such things as the Erosion Cycle, Incise Flow, Precipitation Erosion and Rivers. It's not a huge problem either way, but it may have an effect on the order of tasks I'm working on for my latest WIP.

GW

[waldronate]

Wilbur knows nothing of rainfall. The "Special MDR" file format is "Special" because it encodes the whole world in the 2:1 aspect Equirectangular projection suitable for wrapping on a sphere and "MDR" because that's a Wilbur-unique format I made back in the mid-1990s to solve my problem of image size and data precision information attached to a binary raster array.

On the rainfall topic, I wouldn't put much faith in FT's model. Like the temperature model, it was developed purely to give the users a place to start other than 0cm/0 kelvins.

The original ProFatnasy spec didn't include any of this rainfall/temperature/climate nonsense - it was added in sort of at the last minute. When I added it I always assumed that users would use the editing tools more than the generation tools. It seems that my assumption was incorrect.

Perhaps it was the poor quality of the editing tools or something else, but users seem to want to take the randomly-generated information as gospel. Some of them become incensed and flame the software publicly for having "such a terrible waste of time" built into it. Ah well, live and learn, I suppose.

[Greason Wolfe]

Wilbur knows nothing of rainfall. The "Special MDR" file format is "Special" because it encodes the whole world in the 2:1 aspect Equirectangular projection suitable for wrapping on a sphere and "MDR" because that's a Wilbur-unique format I made back in the mid-1990s to solve my problem of image size and data precision information attached to a binary raster array.

That answers my question perfectly

On the rainfall topic, I wouldn't put much faith in FT's model. Like the temperature model, it was developed purely to give the users a place to start other than 0cm/0 kelvins.

To be perfectly honest, I never have put much faith in FT's climate models and have, more often than not, edited them to suit my purposes.

The original ProFatnasy spec didn't include any of this rainfall/temperature/climate nonsense - it was added in sort of at the last minute. When I added it I always assumed that users would use the editing tools more than the generation tools. It seems that my assumption was incorrect.

Perhaps it was the poor quality of the editing tools or something else, but users seem to want to take the randomly-generated information as gospel. Some of them become incensed and flame the software publicly for having "such a terrible waste of time" built into it. Ah well, live and learn, I suppose.

I hear you on that. As far as I'm concerned, it's still the best product out there for the price, so you'll hear no flaming from me. With the exception of a few correctable quirks, I've been totally happy with FTPro since I purchased it. And now that I'm learning more about using Wilbur, I've found that FTPro is, in a round-about way, becoming even more powerful as far as mapping tools and my style of mapping are concerned.

Thanks much for all your work.

GW

[isomage]

The original ProFatnasy spec didn't include any of this rainfall/temperature/climate nonsense - it was added in sort of at the last minute. When I added it I always assumed that users would use the editing tools more than the generation tools. It seems that my assumption was incorrect.

Hey Waldronate,

Would you be willing to give an explanation of how you compute biomes from those data? It's something I'm interested in doing for my own projects, but haven't been able to find much info of use online.

I can generate plausible global elevation, average temperature, average rainfall maps, but it's proceeding from there I'd like some advice on.

[Greason Wolfe]

Hey Waldronate,

Would you be willing to give an explanation of how you compute biomes from those data? It's something I'm interested in doing for my own projects, but haven't been able to find much info of use online.

I can generate plausible global elevation, average temperature, average rainfall maps, but it's proceeding from there I'd like some advice on.

Bill Roach (can't remember his handle here in the forum), who put together the Terraformer add-on for FTPro did most of his work (or so I understand) based on the Whittaker biome distribution model. (Full name is Robert H. Whittaker) You could try googling that, but I'm not sure what kind of results you'll get.

GW

[waldronate]

Hey Waldronate,

Would you be willing to give an explanation of how you compute biomes from those data? It's something I'm interested in doing for my own projects, but haven't been able to find much info of use online.

I can generate plausible global elevation, average temperature, average rainfall maps, but it's proceeding from there I'd like some advice on.

The attached table (http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif) is the one built into FT. It was a composite from several sources. It's been 10 years now so I can't remember the sources, sorry.

With average rainfall and average temperature climate generation is a straight lookup in that table and color is a lookup from climate type.

[waldronate]

I checked some of the very old documentation and it's very roughly based on Whittaker and a painted map in an old piece of Oxfam propaganda. http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/biomes/biome_main.htm has a good discussion of the types of climate (yes, they should properly be called biomes) used in FT. Some of the terams are different (taiga is boreal in FT, for evxample) and the FT table goes off to infinity in each direction (real earth data has limits), but they are otherwise fairly consistent.

[isomage]

Awesome! Thanks, guys.