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[FluffyToast J]

Fair enough. If theres nothing that can easily be done about it, then dont worry about it. Thats the only thing that I find wrong with it, and its not very big anyway.

[Bricks]

You could crash meteors into the planet during world gen, that would make some interesting bays .

[Lord Dullard]

After toying with things a bit, here's how archipelago-esque maps are coming out:
Worlgen (Large PNG)

Not perfect, but the islands are looking a bit more interesting. Finally, time to finish off ocean/bay naming.

[Lord Dullard]

And ocean/sea and bay names are done! The difference between the two is determined by how many border tiles the body of water takes up. Of course, this can lead to some underestimating by the engine (for example, when a large island splits what is obviously an ocean in half at the border), but it's as good as I'm going to get without producing massive slowdowns on older CPUs. And at worst it'll just result in two bays/lakes instead of an ocean name.

Lakes have also been given a few new titles of British/Irish influence to go along with the somewhat gaelic/olde english flavor my pseudo-name generator seems to have acquired for human names so far (there's a possibility I'll rewrite the entire thing if I find somebody with more knowledge about language, but it does the trick for now).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Onwards and upwards!

[Dwarf]

And ocean/sea and bay names are done! The difference between the two is determined by how many border tiles the body of water takes up. Of course, this can lead to some underestimating by the engine (for example, when a large island splits what is obviously an ocean in half at the border), but it's as good as I'm going to get without producing massive slowdowns on older CPUs. And at worst it'll just result in two bays/lakes instead of an ocean name.

Lakes have also been given a few new titles of British/Irish influence to go along with the somewhat gaelic/olde english flavor my pseudo-name generator seems to have acquired for human names so far (there's a possibility I'll rewrite the entire thing if I find somebody with more knowledge about language, but it does the trick for now).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Onwards and upwards!

You may want to replace that arctic desert with tundra or something like that. Technically, it may be a desert by some standards, but yeah...

[Lord Dullard]

Yep, I'd planned on doing something like that; I've just been trying to figure out the best way to tackle it. It might take splitting desert-naming into two completely separate searches, one for non-frozen and one for frozen - my main worry being that if I only have the current variety of search, deserts that are half-frozen will only end up being one type or the other instead of one of each.

ETA:
And here we go - here we have some nice examples of tundras and the newly-added caves, which are named and filed by the generator discreetly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

ETA II:
After toning down that eye-searing blue a bit...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's better.

[alfie275]

This is awsome!

[Bricks]

Cannot wait for this to have some gameplay, it's really looking great.  If you don't mind me saying, the cave icon doesn't quite fit the ascii style; something a little more abstract would fit in better.

[Lord Dullard]

Thanks for the comments, folks.

Another quick update before I'm off to work for the evening (yeah, after getting a second job my two month break became a two day break, but it's better than being poor!) - any coniferous/evergreen/mixed forests in the bottom quarter of the world now automatically become 'tropical forest', and any named forest with at least 1/2 of its tree tiles taken up by tropical forest squares is renamed to 'Jungle', as in the following pic. (As it turns out, palm trees are near-impossible to make out of a 10x10 pixel grid, especially for a non-artist.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you don't mind me saying, the cave icon doesn't quite fit the ascii style; something a little more abstract would fit in better.

Hm - this is something to think about, but I'm not sure what I'd want to use that would stand out enough amongst all of the surrounding clutter and color. I feel like something as simple as a '>' symbol would be difficult to see. The font set I'm using does come with some pre-drawn simpler looking triangles, though, which might do the trick.

[Armok]

why can't you  jus6t invert the heightmap then use the lakefinedr to find islands?

[Lord Dullard]

You know, that might actually work. The lake-finder works by tracing water levels from just below the shoreline and seeing if it can connect them back on themselves or if they end up touching the worldmap edge - it wouldn't work for islands because if you try to do the same thing with an island, it will also consider a lake an island (since the land around an island goes in a circle and a computer isn't smart enough to recognize the difference).

If it works, I'll slaughter a small animal for you, Armok.

[Armok]

alternatively, you can add an extra test abaut if its an island or a lake: lakes have lower ground at evry point inside, islands have higher ground on evry tile inside. Now, the only problem is islands containing lakes, or lakes containing islands...

[Outcast Orange]

If you aren't going to be certain that the outer ocean makes it all the way around the map,
 you should consider each tile of map edge on a given mass of water to be five to ten tiles of coast.
That way corner "bays" become oceans.

I'm very impressed with all of this, and I hope you stick with this ultimate project.

Who knows, if it ever gets good enough,
 you could make some money.

[Lord Dullard]

That way corner "bays" become oceans.

Actually, the bit of code that generates ocean/bay names already handles this - it differentiates bodies of water in three sizes (one big enough to be ocean, one bay, one lake) - by counting the total number of water tiles along the map edge. It runs from the top left corner of the map clockwise all the way around counting water tiles until it hits land tiles, then records the number of water tiles in a dictionary (and starts over as soon as it hits water again). Then it checks to see if the top left square was water and in both the first and last bodies, and if it was, it combines the two.

[Alexhans]

posting to read it sometime... Looks very interesting.