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Author Topic: How realistic worldgen really is  (Read 42370 times)

Xanares

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #75 on: August 10, 2010, 03:33:42 pm »

Iceland turned out rather well. South pole is a bit close, but badlands and rocky wastes pretty ok. Volcanos too - there are at least 50 - as the 130 real ones were a bit much and only 18 of them have been active anyway.

Humans start near Reykjavik every time. Elves are few and far away. Dwarves are well developed and in close encounter with gobbos, having taken one of their dark fortresses.

I only add four civs to speed up the world gen and game. Occasionally need to redo world gen due to civ failure.


bigger version: http://imgur.com/ukg7H.jpg

heightmap from here: http://binaries.openttd.org/bananas/heightmap/Iceland-1.0.tar.gz
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Shagomir

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #76 on: August 10, 2010, 05:16:42 pm »

Couldn't this be possible on a smaller scale such as States or countries...hell, maybe even state counties.

The problem with that is that DF worldgen will always form glaciers on either the north or south end of the map.  So if you made a map of Texas, the Gulf of Mexico might be freezing while the border with Oklahoma would be a blisteringly hot desert.

This can be sort of fixed in worldgen. You can just set the temp range for something like 50:75, so that it will go from warm to scorching, and just scum worldgens till the north/south temperature gradient is correct. I am able to get massive glaciers in my North America worldgen because I have the temps ranging from 0:75. Those glaciers up north are COLD.

EDIT:

So, I updated the worldgen, basically redid it from scratch. You can now make Large, Medium, Small, and Pocket North Americas, but I wouldn't recommend the smaller sizes as I haven't tested them much. They probably do really strange things.

Link!

EDIT 2:

I made a mistake with the Volcanism map, and there were no sedimentary layers. This has been fixed, so make sure you are using the most recent version from DFFD (v2.3).
« Last Edit: August 10, 2010, 07:43:39 pm by Shagomir »
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rdwulfe

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #77 on: August 10, 2010, 11:56:36 pm »

I gotta say, this is some amazing work, Shagomir. Is there any way to get a copy of Europe again, so we can have multi-sized instances of it? Or did it get posted and I missed it?
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Shagomir

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #78 on: August 11, 2010, 12:21:04 am »

I gotta say, this is some amazing work, Shagomir. Is there any way to get a copy of Europe again, so we can have multi-sized instances of it? Or did it get posted and I missed it?

I did not make the map of europe in the OP, but I may take a crack at it eventually. I want to do a full set of the continents, but it takes a while for me to do these, as I hand-draw the heightmaps to translate the real terrain into something that will work for DF's worldgen, and getting it right takes a few tries. I redrew North America at least 4 times...
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nbonaparte

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #79 on: August 11, 2010, 12:32:32 am »

you do the heightmaps by hand? Google earth can do high detail heightmaps. Here's a tutorial. It's for a different game, but it should work similarly.
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Shagomir

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #80 on: August 11, 2010, 12:37:35 am »

you do the heightmaps by hand? Google earth can do high detail heightmaps. Here's a tutorial. It's for a different game, but it should work similarly.

This would work, except for DF using elevation to equal terrain. In some cases this is good (mountains, hills), but it is bad for low mountains, high plateaus, the high plains, etc. For example, a previous version I created used a height map I found on the internet, but the great plains ended up being 90% hills instead of plains, due to it being at a relatively high elevation. I use topographic maps to get the basic shape of the land and landforms, but I find I get better results with hand-drawn heightmaps, even if the topography isn't 100% accurate.

As another example, if I generated Tibet, it would end up being mountains due to the high elevation the plateau is at, regardless of the terrain should be, like a wasteland or cold desert.
« Last Edit: August 11, 2010, 12:39:44 am by Shagomir »
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nbonaparte

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #81 on: August 11, 2010, 12:42:38 am »

ah, alright. Makes sense. The system works for the automatic world gen, but not for preexisting regions.
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Urist McNewb

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #82 on: August 18, 2010, 09:56:07 am »

Could someone do a map of Ontario? i'm quite horrible with the program myself, but would love having a fort near where i live :P
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Shagomir

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #83 on: August 19, 2010, 12:44:28 am »

Could someone do a map of Ontario? i'm quite horrible with the program myself, but would love having a fort near where i live :P

Hrm. I am sure I could do this fairly quickly once I get home in the morning (working overnights is brutal). Would you be able to do it yourself if I posted a heightmap, or are you looking for a complete world gen?

Otherwise, I do have pefectly serviceable worldgens for the whole of North America, so that would work. I am currently running an awesome fort in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec that has everything I need except for a Magma Pipe (I don't mind building a 150 z-level pump stack, though).

From what I recall, Ontario is mostly flat, with only the northeasternmost reaches of Minnesota's Iron Ranges in the far western portion of the country province, so I would have to include Quebec and the Iron Ranges to have any sort of mountains that a Dwarven civ could live in. It's certainly doable, it's just the problem with small real-world regions is that many of them lack any kind of "mountains", so you end up with a worldgen with no playable civs in vanilla DF. 
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Starver

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #84 on: August 19, 2010, 05:30:45 am »

Regarding mountains, see Mount Wycheproof.

Allegedly the smallest official mountain in the world at slightly less than 50m above the surrounding area.  Albeit named so by mistake[1] rather than by obeying convention.

It might be hard to actually twiddle such a low mountain, but given that Z-levels are of indeterminate real-life height, normalising the actual height-map so that the largest elevation you do have is made mountainous for game purposes might be a way to deal with this.

I live not that far away from an area where anything more than 3ft above sea-level is considered a hill, by local terms, and yet am currently in a city that prides itself on being built on "seven hills"[2] and has car-parks that have more variance of elevation in them than large swathes of the aforementioned region.  :)

[1] Or possibly hubris or irony, on behalf of the surveyor, opinions on that vary, although as an official mountain is at least 500m high in some circles[3], it could easily have been a misplaced decimal in calculations and failed sanity check on the data, just prior to the classifying.

[2] Echoing Rome's claim.  Although that sounds more poetic than empirical (or, indeed, Imperial), and nobody quite knows which seven they are, how big a lump is actually a hill, whether to count hills that are still rising on the way out of the city, where the actual city limit should actually be placed, etc, etc...  YGTI.

[3] In the US, they have 300m, IIRC, and yet in the UK it is often said that there are no mountains in England (highest point, 978m ASL), only Wales (tallest being Snowdon at 1,085m, ditto).  Then again it's "height above base", not height above sea-level, that is the standard (and not been bothered enough to Google those details).  And there's also often slope angle requirements for different elevations as well.  Steeper slopes allowing lower total elevations.  Shallower slopes needing higher ones.
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Shagomir

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #85 on: August 19, 2010, 06:36:24 am »

...normalising the actual height-map so that the largest elevation you do have is made mountainous for game purposes might be a way to deal with this.

This is exactly what I do. However, I do like to have some small amount of realism in the landscape. Taking Ontario for instance, you would end up with much of the canadian shield being mountains, which wouldn't be very realistic (it's mostly rocky hills and trees, iirc).

EDIT:

Try copying and pasting this into your world_gen.txt file in the init folder. It will add it to the list of parameters in "Generate New World With Parameters"

Ontario!


Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I made this in about 5 minutes, so if it's not 100% accurate, you can try and fix it using perfectworld. Otherwise, I may fiddle with it more when I get back from my vacation. (Around the 30th)
« Last Edit: August 19, 2010, 08:52:30 am by Shagomir »
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Draco18s

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #86 on: August 19, 2010, 09:27:57 am »

It's a joke about particularily ignorant Americans believing Europe is a country. As in, whole Europe.

Hey hey hey, I'm an American and I know that Scotireland is its own country, and its anywhere in Britian that isn't London.  I've heard lots of whales live there too.
Yes, I'm joking.
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Mel_Vixen

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #87 on: August 19, 2010, 10:34:38 am »

Well less joke then you think because the scots have a little separation movement going on. ^^

We Europeans are not that much better - for some of Northamerica equals essentialy with the USA.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2010, 10:45:06 am by Heph »
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Draco18s

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #88 on: August 19, 2010, 11:58:30 am »

We Europeans are not that much better - for some of Northamerica equals essentialy with the USA.

Canada is our b*tch, but shhh, don't tell anyone.  They want to keep it a secret. ;P
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: How realistic worldgen really is
« Reply #89 on: August 19, 2010, 12:59:42 pm »

I like the Daily Show version of Canada: America's gay brother who still can't quite cut himself off from Mom.  (England) 

That silly backwords place that just happens to have gay rights, far superior healthcare, better life expectancy, better social safety nets, BUT ALL THAT IS SWEPT ASIDE BY THE FACT THAT THEY LET PEOPLE SPEAK FRENCH, WHILE WE HAVE FREEDOM FRIES!

Of course, even if you ignore all those small equitorial nations and the Carribean island nations, there's still also Mexico.  (Which is an evil place filled with people who want to sneak across the border just to have babies so that they can do the most evil thing in the world - be American while not being white!)
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