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[Gezol]

I'm afraid I don't know as much about the whole subject as I probably should to talk about it, but maybe elevation could determine it?
You could tweak the elevation required for deciduous forests a bit so they need to be on somewhat higher ground and if it's below that then you get swamps. That should help create the effect of having swamps generally being close to water, as well...

[Gezol]

Great minds think alike, I guess. I posted that before I saw you'd already posted again and thought of it...

That sounds good, anyway, more realistic than what I came up with.

[Toady One]

It doesn't quite work though -- the adjacent altitudes are a bit too chaotic, so the swamps would be really disjointed.  That's probably realistic, but from the game perspective of calling something "the marsh of whatever" it doesn't work.  In the end, maybe instead of trying to get everything to happen in this way, there could be a kind of "geology" field that says how wild the terrain is locally.  It would go from 0 to 100 and look like the rest of my fractal maps (perhaps a bit more variance to it though).  This would also influence the canyon-riddled wastelands -- some of them might just be flatter wastes, while others would get outlandish pillars and canyons.  In this way, places with heavy rainfall that have a very low "geology" could become swampy, while having at least some would allow you to be a forest (since the waters run off nicely into streams and rivers, allowing forest trees rather than specialized wetland trees to grow).  Another upside to this would be that there could be extreme geology areas (like your evil=100 evil=0 suggestion) that have very interesting formations.

It's sort of an artificial idea, but I think it might work out well.  It can also be used in the plains to determine things like low-lying hills.  Comments welcome.

[Gezol]

Adding another variable was the other option I'd thought of, but I figured it would make it too complicated... the geology idea sounds like it has potential, though. I guess mangrove forests could be created at the geology level between swamps and deciduous forests. And then it could also determine the different types of grassland- probably lots of things that could be done with it.

The extreme geology areas sound like a fun idea. Maybe if geology is very high, there would be a chance of special landmarks being generated that get noted on the map, and if evil is either very high or very low at in the same place, then those landmarks could be magical. Mount Doom would be an example of one of these. All kinds of fun things could happen at one- one of them could be the only place some magical plant grew, or a place where powerful smiths go to forge magic weapons, or a holy(or unholy) site that attracts pilgrims from all over who gain some blessing from it, or the dwelling of something ungodly powerful, etc. Probably the combination of extremely high geology and extremely high or low evil would be very uncommon, which would be appropriate. These should be rare, special locations. Anyway, that would all be more bloat stuff, I'm sure...

[Toady One]

Adding new fields isn't actually that bad.  A few more wouldn't kill it.  I've put in the geology field to try it out.  I'll post some things whenever I'm more or less satisfied.

[Toady One]

Here's an attempt with geology fields and some new terrain.  The snowy trees jar a bit since there isn't snow elsewhere in that temp range, but whatever.

Map

[Demon]

These maps look freaking awesome!!  Roughly what sort of scale do you have in mind?  Is each square ~1 mile or much bigger?  Smaller?

[Toady One]

uh... uh...  I dunno...  like, open LOTR and look at the scale on that or something.

[Gezol]

Looks pretty good. Yeah, the snowy trees look a bit odd, and there's some anomalous green stuff up in the tundra. Temperature might need a bit more tweaking, or maybe make a new terrain type and restrict the snowy tree terrain(taiga?) to especially cold climates.

On the new terrain, right off the bat I'm noticing some new kinds of rivers. My first guess was that the red rivers were lava, but they aren't necessarily close to volcanoes and mix with the brown rivers, and plus there's that one lake that has red on the edges... intriguing. Also what looks like yellow grassland and hills. Maybe savannah and... not sure what the yellow hills would be...

[Toady One]

Yellow hills are just dry with some yellowish grass.  This happens in unevil places I think.  The nasty rivers are new.  Red is particularly nasty (evil>=95).  Blood, scabs, burning lava blood scabs, who knows.  Just wanted to try that out.  Lakes are the same.  The temperatures are fine -- it's just that hills and grasslands don't have temp<25 variants yet.  If I made them snowy white or...  something (half and half?), it would be good maybe.  The taiga is the only one with the right picture.

[Gezol]

On the red rivers- cool, my idea made it in! Or maybe you'd already had it, dunno. Whatever those red rivers are filled with, I bet there's all kinds of horrible things with tentacles in them. Like the Watcher In The Water. Will the other terrains get evil>=95 variants as well? And will there be evil<=5 variants?

I'd thought swamps were still evil at first glance, and then I realized a lot of that green stuff was actually the new non-evil swamps, not forests... maybe dead forests should be made purple as well to match the swamps, or maybe they could both be made brown. I don't know, it probably doesn't really need changing, but it's slightly confusing to have non-evil swamps and forests both the same color and the evil ones two different colors.

[Captain_Action]

Is the evil rating of an area random?

[Toady One]

Earlier in this thread I posted a map of the evil rating.  It is randomly, but occurs in lumps.  The location of these lumps will determine the flow of battles and so on on the world map.

I'm not sure about how the evil/good variants will work -- you'd want to have more than one I think.  So once it decides to make a subregion of the extreme kind, then it can take the subregion class and do all kinds of new stuff to it, which would in turn determine the picture.  This way evil rivers can be not only red, but green, or whatever else, and filled with specific and putrid things.  Or they could be blue, but have poisonous or otherwise dangerous water.

I dunno about the swamps.  Purple was a color that has been popular since the early Ultimas, and for some reason I was being traditional.

Oh, evil forests don't all have to be the same color...  some could be purple, some could be gray.  I can use that subregions idea again.  Some could just be the regular color, but have strange tree icons, or some could be "stealth" evil forests, and look like neutral ones.  The player shouldn't always get a heads up about these things just by looking at the map.

[ November 26, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Toady One]

Here's the latest.  I added rainforests (uses capital gamma instead of spades for one of the trees), and I made the low temp pictures more snowy for other region types.  I haven't done anything more with alternate pictures for different evil/good places yet.

map

[Toady One]

Here's a simple possibility for really evil/good regions.  In an actual game, you'd probably want to make some of it less obvious, and certain colors might be used for good and evil spots at the same time.  In this one, the dead gray places turn red, the haunted magenta places turn bright magenta, and the good green/yellow/whatever places turn cyan.

map