[HN Gopher] Fantasy Map Generator (2018)
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Fantasy Map Generator (2018)
Author : cjlm
Score : 193 points
Date : 2021-11-12 21:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (azgaar.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (azgaar.github.io)
| xbar wrote:
| Always charming.
|
| I have a World of Greyhawk enlarged and mounted on my wall.
| jokoon wrote:
| There are plenty of similar generators, it's not very difficult
| work.
|
| What I'm more interested is making this a 3D world with
| procedural geometry, make cities, make it run as a multiplayer
| game... Not to mention you cannot store all that geometry, it's
| too large, you can only generate the place you're exploring on
| the fly and save it to a cache and then render it.
|
| Then you would have to explain all your artists and game
| designers how to make all of this work. It's a lot of
| constraints. The multiplayer side won't be interesting unless the
| world is persistent, so you have to split the world into several
| servers to not overload servers, because players need to cross
| the path of other players for the game to feel alive.
|
| AND THEN, you would have to adapt netcode strategies in very
| densely played areas like cities where you have a lot of players
| next to each other.
|
| In the end, such game would be very popular, but I don't think
| you would need a map generator like this, the map would still be
| done by a human because it would yield better results. What
| matters is the high resolution procedural geometry, at a low
| scale: trees, terrain, buildings, etc.
|
| So yes, that's essentially the story of developing world of
| warcraft, except world of warcraft has several world instances
| and phases, because their world is not very large when you look
| how many players they have, they can't have a single world, even
| when they use phases, which is not a cool feature.
| y4mi wrote:
| > _The multiplayer side won 't be interesting unless the world
| is persistent, so you have to split the world into several
| servers to not overload servers, because players need to cross
| the path of other players for the game to feel alive._
|
| Honestly, you only need some shared towns to be persistent.
| Everything else being ephemeral could be made a feature through
| lore (i.e. reality destroying mists which eats the world
| whenever nobody is watching, player characters try to fight
| against the neverending destruction by venturing out into the
| world, temporarily reclaiming parts for harvesting etc.)
|
| The biggest issue would be to actually generate towns, npc
| story etc on the fly. I think you're really underestimating the
| size of that challenge. Generating assets like that is
| generally the most expensive part of game development with
| multiple people working on each one. If you automate that away,
| you'll be able to make a ton of money just by providing modules
| for unreal engine and unity.
| rickosborne wrote:
| If you haven't already seen it, you may be interested in
| Introversion Software's retrospective on their unreleased
| "Subversion" game:
|
| https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY
|
| (That whole series of videos is interesting for anyone who has
| an interest in procedural generation and simulation.)
| jokoon wrote:
| It was abandonned
| joe__f wrote:
| When I tired the 'project on globe' feature, it put a tiny
| rectangle of the map about the size of the UK on a big black
| globe. Presumably not intended behaviour.
|
| Otherwise very cool
| dspillett wrote:
| A slightly older one that produces very nice looking results for
| certain aesthetics is https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/
|
| As well as also being open source, the page gives interactive
| demonstrations of each step that the process takes which is
| interesting.
|
| (edit: clicking round a bit more, Azgaar's project lists the one
| at mewo2 as on if its inspirations/influences)
| sklargh wrote:
| This is important infrastructure for a lot of the table top RPG
| community (virtual and physical). Make sure to contribute to it
| while it's getting the HN hug of death.
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099344 - Sept 2019 (36
| comments)
|
| _Azgaar 's Fantasy Map Generator_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933765 - Sept 2018 (1
| comment)
| Nerada wrote:
| Surprised nobody has mentioned donjon, well worth checking out if
| you haven't seen it before.
|
| https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Something I've been playing with recently is Pixelforest's
| flowscape - allows you to make a 3D fantasy map pretty easily in
| 3D, as opposed to most of them which are focussed on 2D.
|
| There's a page at https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape which
| sort of shows it off - basically it's a Unity engine "game" which
| lets you make landscapes.
| noduerme wrote:
| That's gorgeous!! I haven't played with scenery software for so
| long... but this reminded me of becoming obsessed with
| VistaPro[1] in the early 90s, even buying a FPU coprocessor to
| speed up rendering fly-throughs of landscapes. I just thought
| it was the coolest thing ever. This would have been a dream toy
| for me back then.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro
| mjgoeke wrote:
| Oh gosh, me too. I recall calling a number in the back of a
| magazine to buy VistaPro 3. I was a dirt-poor kid at the
| time. I asked for the upgrade, and was worried because I
| didn't own v2, just the first version. They laughed and said
| it would work fine.
|
| It came and was the full install, they were just giving a
| discount if you owned the previous version. It came with two
| additional CDs filled with DEMs. One with DEMs in the US, the
| other across the world.
|
| Fun times, getting lost in the madness of creating.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Reminds me of Bryce too...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software)
| Datagenerator wrote:
| And the pure assembly demo's showing realtime Mars like
| landscapes, my brother was always looking for precomputed
| tables to avoid the expensive div and mul, fun times.
| Software was optimized in size and execution speed in the
| early days. Also remember the first voxel based flight
| simulation like Novalogic's Comanche.
| _Microft wrote:
| Back then, I spent a lot of time generating amazing
| landscapes with the free version of Terragen. One of
| these image served as my desktop background for several
| years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terragen
| [deleted]
| drusepth wrote:
| Related: a list of similar map generators at
| https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators
| leprechaun1066 wrote:
| Also check out https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
| xipho wrote:
| Seconded. Highly recommended. Just beautiful stuff. Just
| started a series that includes code and approach, which makes
| it even more interesting IMO.
| _Microft wrote:
| This blog is an absolute gem. I especially liked the series
| of entries about forests, mountains and map borders a lot.
|
| If you occasionally check it and worry that there are no new
| entries, then be reassured that this happens from time to
| time. The author considers this his "Forever Project". For
| that reason, he's not forcing things so that he does not lose
| interest in it.
|
| https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-
| forever-p...
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(page generated 2021-11-13 23:03 UTC)