World Generator

[Setvenharis]

For those who can't afford Fractal Terrains, here's a site that may come in handy for GMs......


http://www.bin.sh/gaming/tools/world.cgi


There's other stuff on this site too, but the World Generator should prove the most useful.

[StyroFoam Man]

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poster

[Sundowner]

Cool, Thanks

The digital art is well worth a look as well, some is really well done.

Sundowner

[Ezri's Toy]

Sweet! If you make the images large enough (Map height: 1024), you can convert them into .tif files, import them into Freehand, trace them, add detail, and -boom!- Scalable vector graphic maps!

This site saves a lot of work! Thanks for the link.

Hey, Don! Something like this would a good premium for paying members!

[redwood973]

Okay, so I have been playing with this for a while now. I am not understanding what some of the data sets are doing.

Percent water/ice, and map height/projection are easy enough. But what are random seed, iterations, and the rotation data sets doing for the outcome?

[Balok]

"Random" numbers, in computer science, really aren't random. What they are is the product of mathematical transformations that have this property: you are statistically very, very unlikely to guess the next number in the sequence. But every sequence starts with a number, and in random number generation, this is called the 'seed'.

The rest of your questions, someone else will have to answer.

I tried it about a half dozen times with different properties and it seems to produce a lot of single continent planets (I did use 40-60% water and 7-10% ice, with 5000 iterations).

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by redwood973
Percent water/ice, and map height/projection are easy enough. But what are random seed, iterations, and the rotation data sets doing for the outcome?

Messing around with just iterations (and leaving everything else the same), it seems that "iterations" deals with the number of lines that are criss-crossing to form the variations in altitude. If you take it all the way down to 100, you'll notice the map looks like a cubists representation. As you increase the numbers, you'll find that the lines become more numerous, and, thus, more subtle. But that's just my observation; I have no idea how it factors into the equations.

Rotation, it appears to me, just shifts the image along the planet's poles. It's more noticable, I think, when you look at the spherical projections.

[drow]

Percent water/ice, and map height/projection are easy enough. But what are random seed, iterations, and the rotation data sets doing for the outcome?

Balok and Sea Tyger are pretty much spot on with their responses.

you might also be interested in my SF world generator, which adds some random statistical data to the output, and star system generator.

cheers!