Kingdoms

Alright, this is going to be an interesting and fun work-in-progress thread about a neat little filter I'm developing...

The working title of the filter is "Kingdoms", and the idea behind it is to create a texture generator for hand-drawn fantasy maps, much like those found in the good old 'Lone Wolf' solo-roleplaying-adventure books (if anyone remembers those). I certainly loved them, and I've drawn many similarly styled fantasy world maps myself in my more innocent days. Luckily, I've already developed some of the basic geography and inking 'ingredients' necessary to (re)create these maps in two of my filters: "Cartography" and "Spelunker's Scribble"!

So what maps am I talking about? Check out the two reference images of 'Lone Wolf' maps below...

[Reference image #1]

I've taken the 'geography' and 'inking' techniques a little further with this one, and developed some coastal cliffs. They're already coming along nicely, IMO...

An early test for scattering mountains... long way to go still!

Love this idea!

And that geographical inking technique is looking mighty good already.

yep looking interesting, will enjoy it's development

While waiting for a good solution for the mountains to present itself to my mind (all in good time!), I'll be working on expanding the geography generation. Specifically, I'm looking to create...

- closed inland depressions (bordered by cliffs, but not filled with water)
- closed inland plateaus (i.e. cliffs rising out of the land)
- beaches, specifically where high cliffs exist
- gorges & ravines (crack-like)

hehehe. very clever

Wow... ambitious!
So, wow are you going to do the mountains? Scattering or something else?

Here's a nice historic map of Latvia... has some similarities to the map above.

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ThreeDee wrote: - rivers - inland lakes ...might be nice, too.

Yup, indeed.

One would have to integrate this into a rivers/lakes network, but the difficulty is making it flow from the mountains to the ocean, with springs becoming rivers, rivers joining into bigger rivers, river deltas, etc. Also, we'll need waterfalls in those areas where rivers are throwing themselves over some coastal cliffs.

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Crapadilla wrote: The Kingdom of Crapadilla..

For some reason the television series 'Through the keyhole' saying springs to mind with this image . 'Now who lives in a place like this?'

Love the way you have done them maps though and the mountain height edging, or should say coastal cliffs

Extruding techno noises with Loop. Interesting possibilities when it comes to generating mountains... but too slow.

That is really nice looking, and not just as mountains. The mountains in the Hexagonal Game Map filter are also very nice.

This is a great idea for a filter! Your results are well done and looking really good so far!

Yup, that's about as far as I've come. Man, this filter concept has been haunting me for years. Recently, I feel an urge to finally realize it.

For the mountains I'll definitely use Bomber, but the main body of work lies in constructing all the different city 'icons'. And the internal logic for rivers and roads, of course (Clicky!* ^^).

Also, I wish I could just hook up all the elements (mountains, hills, forests, cities) into one giant N-particle Bomber to make it automatically depth-sort correctly. Damned 5-particle Bombers... we need polymorphic components! It's a depth sorting nightmare otherwise.



[ * which brings us back to Delaunay triangulation, which... ermm... we don't have yet! ]

The land is pretty empty, but that's gonna change soon. Grasslands and desert shading can still be improved, but I'll postpone that until after I've introduced the mountain bombers...

Mildly looks like Asia.

Imagine some of those boundaries being plates. I'd never live on that weird lagoon area. haha -- Then again, I live right where earthquakes happen everyday.

Shading for all the different types of regions (i.e. tundra, jungle, desert, and more) is mostly complete. Some detail shots...

Mountains with the bomber...

Note to self:

Revisit cliffs/ravines procedures. Make them dependent on the "plate tectonics" system used for the mountains.

It's coming together! Love the bomber mountains! Haha the Great Bomber Moutain Range

Still a long way to go. Next up is vegetation...

Inevitable Geography, pt.1