WIP - Batai

[Master TMO]

I'm an almost complete newb at this world-building business, so I thought I'd post this map as I worked on it. If I do anything silly/stupid, folks can correct, and if I do happen to do something new and good, I can answer questions.

As a concept, there's nothing special about Batai the world, just an Earth-like. I'm working on it for a friend's MMORPG. He would probably be happy with this default map, but I'm going to use it as a learning experience. Here's the default map.

I'll add posts to this thread as I make progress.

[arsheesh]

Hello Master TMo, and welcome to the guild. Hm, I'm not seeing a map?

[Master TMO]

I attached the wrong one, so you must have looked while I was swapping maps out.

[Master TMO]

I exported it into Photoshop to make a contour map, so I could determine how the mountain ranges would affect the wind patterns, and where to place deserts and rainforests. I built a wind pattern map in Powerpoint since I'm no meteorologist and couldn't handle trying to figure all that out in my head.

Changing the rainfall to fit is my next task. Right in the middle of the map is an area that goes below sea level and is completely surrounded by mountains. It's also just south of the 30 degree latitude, which is the lat where deserts tend to form. The mountains would block all the rainfall brought in from the ocean to the east, so it's going to be a Death Valley-like area only massively larger. The eastern side of that mountain range is going to be totally soaked with all the rain that should have been dropped in that valley.

[tilt]

wow... I usually just put my finger in the air and go... hmmm... deserts would be cool ... here..
nice that you do all the hard work first

[Steel General]

This is interesting so far, and I am looking forward to watching it develop.

Like tilt, I just more or less spin in a circle and plunk my finger down and say "Here's the desert" - all that other stuff is to much work for me.

[jwbjerk]

Looks pretty good.

I don't know what method you are using to figure weather, but you might be interesting in this guide... it's worked pretty well for me.

Maybe you are more comfortable in powerpoint, but i did my figuring high/low pressure areas, etc. on transparent layers in photoshop. It's nice to have the info right there to turn on/off when you need to see it.

[Master TMO]

Downloaded the Guide, thanks for the reference! After several web searches, I found this page that I used as my reference guide: http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/circulation.html

And I would have loved to use PS to develop the high- and low-pressure areas, but I couldn't do the wind direction arrows quick and easy there, so I used Powerpoint, which *loves* making arrows. Probably just a problem of me not knowing how to build them in PS, and I was too lazy to look up that on top of the climate research I was doing.

Oh, I was going to ask: Are there any good custom climate shader images for use in Fractal Terrains available? I haven't found any yet on a few quick casts, but I'll keep looking.

Climate before and after maps coming up soon...

[Master TMO]

These are using the default Fractal Terrain climate colors, so they're not very 'realistic' colors. I've also added in the terrain shading to help you see what is where.

Steps I took:
* Selected the area that I'm unimaginatively calling the 'Great Desert', feathered the selection and globally set the rainfall across it to 2 in/year.
* Added Global Noise to the Rainfall, to add some randomization to it. The only visible effect of this is that the boundary between chapparal (brown) and desert (yellow) is fuzzier than before.
* Selected the 'little desert' to the northeast of the Great Desert and did a similar process, but it has more rainfall (base 5 in/year).

* Then I selected a band along the equator (about +/- 10 or 15 degrees), made it wavy around the terrain obstacles, heavily feathered it, then added about 20 inches of rainfall a year.
* Did the same thing again with a slightly smaller band and pumped up the temperature about 10-15 degrees.


Hrrmmm... Looking at it, I think I need to reduce the rainfall south of the Great Desert more. It's got a lot of rain there from being on the equator, but shouldn't get quite so much. It's not often you see a desert and a tropical rainforest right next to each other.

My next step is probably to fill in the lakes where the elevation goes below sea level.

[Master TMO]

Argh... Doing lakes and rivers is proving difficult. Especially that one in the far north - if I just run the Fill Basins command, that entire section up to the sea is completely filled in and flattened. So I'm trying to cut a channel through the mountains and it's very slow going. I didn't mind it flattening in the tropical zone (makes for a better Amazon river with river paths filling in the whole area) or the southern small lake. But that northern one is just too big to convincingly be a flat plain.

Also, I don't know if it's a function of the fractal generator I chose or not, but if I run the 'Fill Basins as Lakes' command, it just floods the entire place with lakes. Basins all over the place. Same issue if I fill with land, flat plains everywhere. So, lot's of manual corrections.