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[Toady One]

This stuff is so good, even George C. Scott would look at this stuff.  Well, it needs a little work, so I might not get the job, but at least he wouldn't beat me over the head with a lamp.

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[Gezol]

Dwarf Fortress world maps I assume? Nice. Is that what you've been working on lately?

What's the purple stuff? I'm guessing wetlands. And the big red triangles- are those volcanoes?

[Toady One]

Yep.  Yep.  Yep.  Yep.

Well, I've been working on the C++ification a lot too, and making some progress.  I've got various text files now so that weapons, instruments, trap components, toys and whatever can be added with reckless abandon.

[Bigmunchos]

So Toady,  what does this mean about the game?  That you can travel to distant lands on the map, and check out what other races are doing?  Like check out a "Human Fortress" or "Elvish Fortress" in a neighboring zone? That would seem like a huge undertaking.  Almost... epic...

[Beleghoul]

I'm guessing that it's randomly generated? And if it is I must say the generator does a great job. [and so did the generator's creator] And a map legend would be nice. Most of the stuff is self-explanatory but there are 3 or more types of forests and it would be nice to know which is which. [not to mention the mysterious square root signs]

[Toady One]

The maps are randomly generated.  It makes four fractal maps: elevation, rainfall, temperature and evil.  Then it runs rivers and lakes which carve the elevation map a bit (first it runs 100000 without keeping them to simulate erosion, then it runs 400 and keeps them).  After that it checks the map for balance between all the terrain types.  Usually 200 or so maps are rejected before it keeps one, but most of the rejections happen before erosion, so the whole process usually takes 15-20 secs (on my computer anyway).  It'll be fine if it takes a lot longer, since you might only do this once during your whole dwarves career.  Wait...  does that imply that the map persists between games?

Legend

Rainfall

Temperature

Evil

I'll leave what your dwarves will end up doing on the map to your imagination, since it isn't programmed yet and I don't want to commit to anything.  We had to cut back on the original plan in order to get it released at some point, but anything is fair game.  A lot of the remaining core elements that need to be put in the game relate to the world map.

[ November 25, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Joe Sixpack]

That is very impressive, I'm glad that everyone will be able to get their own unique map.

[Toady One]

You can even mail your save folders around between games and have like, a correspondence universe or something.

[Svirfneblim]

Will in far future there be a map editor?

"What do you mean that having desert
in the south is copyrighted?"

[Toady One]

We've thought about putting one in.  Who knows when.  It would be really neat to be able to construct a precise world map, and place all the civilizations and come up with the enemy profiles and so on.  Then you can fire it up and see how it turns out, more than once.  All of the language files and creature definitions and items and all that are in text files, so you could really change a lot of stuff around.   The text files are currently encrypted, but there's no reason to maintain that -- I'd certainly like to keep an option for the encrypted version so that people can download a spoiler-free copy.  It might be tempting to increase the size of dwarves, for example.

[Prospero]

Very very nice, I like it  

[Toady One]

Anything significant missing by the way?  I guess I could separate out the plain types a bit more, since there are things like steppes and savannas...  there aren't really "jungles" right now -- it doesn't use temperature a lot.  Some of the high rainfall/high temperature forests could be changed over.

[Gezol]

I guess the main things you could do with it from here involve temperature-related stuff, as you say, and evil. Rainforests when temperature and rainfall are both over a certain amount, coniferous forests in very low temperature areas could be taigas, maybe there could be mangrove forests in hot, swampy areas. A few different kinds of grassland, as you say- savannahs when the temperature is high and steppes when it's low or something like that.

There's a lot you could do with the evil thing- at the moment, hills and grasslands seem to be missing evil versions. Although I can't think what they would be called...
Another idea is that if evil is at or close to maximum, you might get special terrains that were one level beyond the other evil terrains. For example, Haunted Woods, Hellish Wastelands, Cursed Fens... you could use those names or come up with your own, but anyway, these could have especially powerful and nasty inhabitants, maybe some found nowhere else. And various weird special things could happen there...
The reverse could exist as well, if evil was at or almost at zero- Sacred Forests, Blessed Plains, that sort of thing. All this would be probably be major bloat stuff though...

On the evil note, are swamps only possible when evil is over a certain level? That doesn't quite seem right... maybe it could be that they're called wetlands at EV<66.

[Toady One]

Yeah, the thing with swamps/wetlands was that I don't have a way to distinguish between what should be deciduous/low-altitude forests and what should be swamps.  It seems like something extra determines this, like how surface water runs.  Since I didn't have that, I just used evil.  I'm open to suggestions on this.  I guess I could look up more info on wetlands and swamps.

[Toady One]

I guess one thing I could try is the slope of the square (based on the adjacent elevations).  
Some wetlands tend to form when there is very little elevation change (and thus slower moving water).  An additional factor could be proximity to rivers and lakes, although I also want to have rivers and lakes in the forests.