#Fantasy map designer rivers how to
#Fantasy map designer rivers generator
#Fantasy map designer rivers code

Round - normalize, then take the square root of the height value, to round off the tops of hills.Normalize - rescale the heights to lie in the range 0-1.We also have a few operations which are handy: Rounded blobs - these make better hills, and can be scattered all around to make a noisy surface.Cone shapes - these can be islands or mountains, or if inverted, lakes or seas.Constant slope - if you want to pretend this is physically motivated, think of it as tectonic uplift on one side of the map.Some useful primitives which we can add together: This lets me control theīroad outlines of the terrain, while leaving the details for the more physical 'proto-landscape', built with geometric primitives. Rather than an infinite regress of older landscapes, I start with a simple Reasonable amount of time, so we need to cheat slightly. There's no good way to simulate this process in a Landscapes, which in turn evolved from even earlier landscapes, and so on backįor billions of years. One of the difficulties of creating landscapes in a realistic way is that real I have a programmer's superstitions about always using powers of 2, which are more pleasing to the spirit of the machine.

#Fantasy map designer rivers generator

Note: this shows 256 (2 8) points, to make viewing easier, but the real generator uses 16,384 (2 14) points. Three, which helps in some parts of the code. This has the advantage that the number of neighbours per node is fixed at Original point set, which correspond to the corners of the Voronoi polygons. There are rapidly diminishing returns after a fewĪll of the calculations are actually carried out on the 'dual points' of the For speed, I only use one iteration of this process, but you can repeat itĪs many times as you like.

These points tend to be aīit clumpy and uneven, so I use Lloyd relaxation to improve the point I start by selecting points at random within the map. Won't go into too much detail here because that article explains it very

#Fantasy map designer rivers how to

The approach I use is the same as in this article, which is one of theīetter references out there on how to do non-fractal terrain generation. Linear artifacts in the finished product. Give the map a rough, organic feel, and you never have to worry about nasty If you use an irregular grid, then there are aįew things which are more complicated, but the structure of the grid helps to Run into weird artifacts, and you often have to do a lot of postprocessing to Simpler to work on a regular square grid, I much prefer to work on an irregular To represent the heightmap, first we need a grid of points. Place cities and 'regions' on the map, and place their labels. Then we can render the 'physical' portion of the map. Height-map of the terrain, and do things like routing water flow over the There are a few different stages to the generator. Random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. The large-scale structure always looks a bit off. These methods produce lots of fine detail, but Generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach,Įither directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain

Luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.Īt the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physicalīasis. These imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever The cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of You may also be interested in this companion piece, which describes

#Fantasy map designer rivers code

On Github here, and the original messy Python generator code can be There's JavaScript code for the generator These are some notes on how I generate the maps for my Twitter which is based on a generator I originally producedĭuring NaNoGenMo 2015.