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[chaoticag]

This seems to be coming along quite nicely. It comes surprisingly close to an idea I once had.

[Bricks]

Starting to look nice; the forests as icons look a little more descriptive than darker blobs of green.  I need to figure out libtcod; pygame is making me grind my teeth.  For the northern regions, have you considered freezing over some of the ocean, too?  I think it would look nice and help differentiate it from simple snow-covered land.

EDIT:  Of course, the OS X distribution of libtcod keeps puking errors.  Apparently it's "never been tested."  I'm going to go head-butt the pavement.  What blows my mind is that it distributes with valid OS X applications.

[Psyco Jelly]

Also, snow on the top of mountains would be a nice touch.

[Blacken]

This looks highly slick. I'm a big fan of libtcod; I was a contributor to the .NET bindings for a while. I'll be interested to see how this turns out!

[Lord Dullard]

Not only do you get snow caps on mountains - you get mountain shadows, too!

Check out the Land of Pendalwin for an example.

It's time to move on to named locations. First off will be actual geographical location name generation (the Bay of Blah, Foobar Peak, the Desert of Yadayada, and so on). Aside from having flavor value, these will be used by NPCs to give you directions, and you'll have an option as an adventurer to have them displayed as 'hovering text' on the world map at all times to help you remember where you are.

[Outcast Orange]

That's really cool!

I am impressed.

[Rafal99]

Looks very nice!

May I ask what sort of algorithm do you use for terrain generation?

[Lord Dullard]

Mountains have been changed north of the arctic line so that they too become completely snow-covered.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've included multi-threading capability into the worldgen process, which means you can now sit back and watch as the code 'draws' the world map layer by layer. It's pretty neat, especially considering how much more still needs to be added - and even better, it's *quick*! Additionally, you can now actually move the viewfinder around during generation.

For those of you that would like to get a preview of world generation so far, here you go! (~7 megabytes)

Again, I have no idea how compatible it will decide to be with non-Windows OSes at this point, but it might be worth a try.

May I ask what sort of algorithm do you use for terrain generation?

The libtcod library comes with some very useful heightmap generation/manipulation functions, although it takes a lot of tweaking (and sometimes outright ignoring or rewriting) to get things just right.

To expand on that a bit, essentially the world map is just layers comprised of mixes between simplex noise and voronoi diagrams that are mapped on to a large grid and then normalized to represent a heightmap (it's not as complicated as it sounds, really).

[FluffyToast J]

Wow. This tech demo looks absolutely amazing, and from your description of the gameplay makes it sound really good. Definately going to play this once it's done. Well done.

[x2yzh9]

Wow, this project is moving along rather fast Lord Dullard.

[Lord Dullard]

To those who have expressed interest/support, thank you! It's good to hear, since I'm relatively new at Python coding, and gives me hope that the end product won't cause total mental breakdown.

Wow, this project is moving along rather fast Lord Dullard.

Terrain generation did go rather swimmingly, but I suspect history/civ generation will be quite a bit more complex to wade through.

[Blacken]

Terrain generation did go rather swimmingly, but I suspect history/civ generation will be quite a bit more complex to wade through.

Having done something similar before--with individual people and families rather than civilizations as a whole, but on a similar scale--the coding part is unlikely to be the hard part. The hard part's likely to be tweaking everything to look good.

Unless you do something wacky (and by extension really cool), it really is just a big honking whack of looping iteration. Nothing to be daunted by.

[Lord Dullard]

A very quick update before I run off to an interview () and then work:

Named mountain peaks can now be generated. The algorithm for doing this took some tweaking until it stopped crashing script, but now it's working pretty handily. I do need to tweak some settings to get it working just the way I want, and I also want to set it up so that it has the ability to name bluffs and low hills in worlds where few tall mountains are generated, but here's a teaser --

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Outcast Orange]

Wow!
That is epic.

I am very excited about this project now.

[inteuniso]

This looks pretty epic dude. Like Black & White except without God powers... or a creature... or anything like that.