2016-08-18 Uncharted Atlas

If you’re more traditionally minded, you might want to take a look at @unchartedatlas by @mewo2. The processes is explained in his blog post Generating fantasy maps and his internally consistent placename scheme is explained in his blog post Generating naming languages, both of them highly recommended reads.

Generating fantasy maps

Generating naming languages

I was reminded of my old efforts which were also based on Amit Patel’s 2010 blog post Polygonal Map Generation for Games using Voronoi diagrams, the Monones Island Generator. It didn’t go very far because I was stumped by the “draining lakes” problem – which I have now solved for Text Mapper! Should I revisit it? Are Voronoi diagrams something we even want for our role-playing games?

Polygonal Map Generation for Games

Monones Island Generator

Text Mapper

Some discussions on G+ here and here.

here

here

I think it should be possible to automatically label Voronoi diagrams. I started to manually label them, trying to see how far I’d get. Then again, assuming I wanted to manually edit the maps once the game gets going, I’d need a text representation of the polygon centers. I guess that means I could also just stick to some sort of latitude and longitude. Coarse enough to enable editing and still work to recreate the map might just mean three digits instead of two, ie. 001.0001 instead of 01.01 might be enough.

manually label them

​#RPG ​#Maps