It’s about noon, we’re still at the breakfast table; all the food is gone and we’re reading. My wife is reading the Black Company novels in English and asks vocabulary and pronunciation questions every now and then. I finished a newspaper article on China and the real estate market (Evergrande), and on how the CHP could be worse than the AKP in Turkey, and so I decided to turn my attention to something I love instead.
I was talking to @wandererbill the other day, and we were talking about the Alpine maps Text Mapper creates. We were looking at some images on @textmapper and I was talking about ways to set the parameters to get some coastlines. Laurens wondered about the large lakes it would sometimes produce, and then, as an aside, he said that predominant wind patterns would lead to some mountain sides being drier.
Hm… 🤔 That might be way to add more variation, for sure. Let’s see.
Here’s a map where the “bottom” is set to 4 (instead of 10), where there are 12 “peaks” (instead of 7) and the “steepness” is 1.6 (instead of 2.0) – and the seed is set to 1. Lots of forests and all that.
Here we add wind from the north. All it does is it prevents river sources to the south of mountains. The effect is quite noticeable on the eastern half of the map, even though many things remain unaffected: rivers can still flow through these hexes, a lack of a gradient still results in bogs and swamps, and so on.
There’s just a slight tendency for less rivers, and the result is that no forest grows in these places: we get predominantly grassland, and grass is what my Alpine maps were missing. Well, from what I remember central Europe is covered in forests when humans do not interfere. You only get natural grassland above the treeline, which is where the entire alp economy comes from: drive cattle up there in spring, bring it back down in autumn, and thereby take advantage of a biome that is not suited for agriculture.
All of that to say that I don’t really believe in natural grass land occurring in Switzerland. It’s either bog, swamp, or forest. Any grass land is made by humans for their animals.
To me, the open steppe (or prairie) does not come naturally. Even if I think of something like a natural grassland, like the Camargue in the south of France, it’s actually marshland unless humans drain it:
Approximately a third of the Camargue is either lakes or marshland. … Much of the outer Camargue has been drained for agricultural purposes. – Camargue, on Wikipedia
This makes me think I should try something else. First, the wind shadows of mountains: let’s keep that. Less rivers is fine. Turn “dry” land into grassland at high altitudes and to bushes at lower altitudes.
Next up: marshes along the coast lines, estuaries? And for Hex Describe (which consumes these maps): ports in settlements by the sea; and crab men infestations; and sirens.
Oh, and how do we get islands in the ocean? And I want poisoned rivers spreading the radioactive waste, too!
Updated to add estuaries screenshot:
Updated to add the effect of ports: if built near the water (i.e. also near lakes), a village turns into a town, a town into a large town, and a large town into a city (at least in theory, since the algorithm doesn’t place any large towns).
And in order to reflect the increased wood cutting for towns, large towns, and cities, I removed the trees and switched the colour to “soil” and “light soil” which acts as a highlight. Without a biome, these hexes are now “safe” (well, except for urban encounters I guess).
More tinkering: hex 1506 should also be marshland because of the river from 1605; hex 2806 should be bushes because on the altitude model it’s actually higher up than the rivers at 2607 and 2807.
#Maps #Text Mapper #RPG
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I’m a bit unhappy with how rivers flow to the coast. It’s more pronounced if you use a steepness of 1.8, for example: the land will descend faster towards the sea and so the ocean might actually end up on the map. Here’s a good example:
Note the dry areas to the north and south of the river mouth. That’s because in this system, river sources only happen at higher altitudes and therefore closer to the coast, there are fewer river sources, leading to drier biomes away from the lush river valley itself.
So how would I fix this? Add more altitude variation? The altitude map does look like it could use some more random elevations?
Actually… I think the code already ought to be doing random elevations and it’s not working. Oops!
– Alex 2021-12-25 20:00 UTC
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Ah, this is better. And when a river has carved a canyon, that no longer turns the hex into a swamp or forest.
– Alex 2021-12-25 20:38 UTC
