Thursday, October 6, 2016

Welcome!

In the late summer of 2016, Martin O'Leary made a posting on his web blog of a fantasy map generator written in Javascript.

An example map from Martin O'Leary's fantasy map generator

I was quite intrigued by Martin's map generator.  (So was a lot of the Internet.  And even National Geographic.)   But unlike most folks, I accepted Martin's invitation to grab the code and start playing with it.

An example map from my modified map generator

For the past month or so, I've continued to modify and extend Martin's map generator.  His maps reminded me of something you might see inside the front cover of an old fantasy paperback, so I made them look more like an old book page.  I added color, and different ways to display the maps. 

Along the way I've run into some interesting problems and insights.  I've posted some of these to the procedural generation Reddit, but I don't want to overstay my welcome there with constant posting, so I decided to start this blog up to capture some of my work in creating this map generator.  If that's the sort of thing you find interesting, I welcome your attention!  My posting here will no doubt be erratic and meandering, so I encourage you to subscribe through RSS, email or some other method to be notified of new material.

12 comments:

  1. Stupid typos... no idea how I missed this blog until now, but I'm so happy I'm here now!

    *pops popcorn, starts frantically reading *

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  2. Lol. Well, glad you found it and I hope you enjoy it!

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  3. This is a great blog. Really appreciate all the work and thought.

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  4. Long ago, lost in the mists of time I took a crack at random generation of terrain. I found erosion very useful in making terrain look more realistic--and I was using a much more simplistic version of erosion than this code uses. I never took it past simply making a height map but what I produced back then seemed like something that could really exist.

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  7. Did you publish it somewhere? Wanted to try it out.

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    1. At the moment this is just a personal growth project. I may publish it at some point.

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    2. Thanks for the answer! I'm interested because I wanted eventually (maybe) integrate it with a site for forum RPG games (non-profit site, etc). If you feel interested in any way, that would be a nice addition, if not, that's up to you of course =). Either way, this would be in any way a long term plan, as the site needs a serious rework, which will take time.

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  8. I would really like to study your code. Is there a public fork available anywhere?

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    1. As I said, in the mists of time--that was before things like Github.

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