Brendan Lally wrote:
On 11/12/05, Mark Wedel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Crossfire
is somewhat limited by only 1 aspect of terrain is available (we don't have
forested mountains for example).
Forested mountains could exist in principle, it just requires someone
to be able to draw alpine trees.
All that said, if we were to create another continent and wanted to start with
an automatic process, there are many improvments I can think of:
1) Create altitude map (with different seed of course) like did before.
Actually, I think it might be preferable to create tectonic plate
boundaries, and then generate heights from that, it would give a much
greater concentration of mountains, without having them scattered
everywhere (and impeding movement)
I believe there are other projects out there (not related to crossfire) about
mimicing a planet creation process. If we were really serious, we should look
at those.
It would also be more realistic.
2) Based on that altitude map, run weather on it for a long time (elevation <0
is of course see).
The problem with that is that the same results aren't guarenteed, so
if this is done once, and a mistake is made with a heightmap somewhere
(a big mountain in the centre of navar, say) it could be difficult to
run the weathermap to the same effect again after fixing it.
My point was that this would be done for a new continent.
If that is the case, you start with a heightmap that looks reasonable (land
mass about right shape, desired distribution, etc). You then run the weather on
that, and with that, fill in the terrain.
Then with that, you use that as the blank slate to start putting towns,
dungeons, etc on. Having the above info actually makes some of that process
easier - towns wouldn't be in the middle of a mountain range, but likely along
the rivers, and most typical, at the river/sea junction.
But point here is that this is still creating a map with actual forest spaces
and whatnot - you use a dynamic process to create a static map.
That said, if the same weather process is used to create this static map as
that used in the game, then at least as the game runs, the weather would be
consistent with the terrain. For example, right now, there are desert areas on
the map, but with the weather code, I have no idea what level of rainfall they
get, since the location of the desert was rather arbitrary set (lets put it here).
Same for jungle & forest.
Water has to go somewhere, so that determines rivers,
lakes, and marshes (lakes would basically be formed when the total water flowing
into a set of spaces is above some amount and that set of space(s) is
constrained by higher objects around that would hold the water.
This would also be limited by temperature, at lower temperatures, the
amount of inflowing water needed is less, because less evaporation
occurs. (this is a major part of the reason why there are so many
lakes in scandinava).
True. And if really clever, analysis of the rivers would lead to other
terrain. Terrain that is very close to river/sea elevation would typically be
swamp (river elevation in this case being the elevation of the river space
compared to neighboring spaces).
The amount of water flowing from the river relative to the number of spaces the
river flows into would determine how big a lake gets (you could basically
determine the depth of the lake). If it isn't very deep, or once again,
relative to spaces next to the lake the altitude is about the same, you'd get
marsh in those neighboring spaces.
In geological terms, rivers will carve out valleys. So in those cases where a
river flows into what would form a lake, see where the water would flow out and
make some random determination if the ground in that area is hard (rock) or soft
(earth/gravel/whatever), and thus a gorge would get eroded away to let the water
out, and you don't have a lake anymore.
Mountains should probably be determined if the elevation is above some height.
But low mountains are also possible, but that should be done based on
different of elevation of neighboring spaces - if a space is say 1000' different
in elevation from its neighbors, it is a mountain.
similar for mountains, but no height - just height difference (in the 250-500'
range?).
Well, if the surrounding area is high, and there is a line of low
altitude, then you get a canyon, if the surrounding land is low, and
there is a line of high altitude, then you get a mountain ridge.
Right, I mistyped in my second paragraph, I meant hills there. Hills would be
terrain that changes altitude but not as drastically as mountain. Which makes
sense - lots of mountain ranges have hills at the base of them
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