[WIP] Mathig's Planetary Map

[Mathig]

I recently decided to start creating a full planetary map for a story I am thinking of writing. The story will definitely mandate doing the entire world, with special focus on strategic positions throughout the globe. I want to learn about programming, so using existing planetary generators isn't useful. Short-cuts in programming, best practices, realistic physics etc. are useful.

I've segmented the creation of this world into a number of stages, which I will work through sequentially. I will go back and forth between a few as I get the hang of it, learn more about how to do this better, and hopefully get some feedback or suggestions. I've currently starting on the second stage. I'll write up pdf's showing my work and progress for each stage. Before I get to the final section, does anyone know any good resources to combine altitude/rainfall/drainage/temperature maps into realistic looking maps. Information on the code behind how it works would be absolutely amazing.

Current Map Progress:


Stages

• Tectonic Plate Generation: I'm working on a C# code to do this for me. The scale is 200x400 points for an entire planet, using Cylindrical projection. Since I don't have the time nor skill to make the function actually... functional. Instead, I'll make it go half-way, then manually finish it.
  
• Plate Movement: Simulate the plates moving around the planet, using C# code. This simulates that the plates weren't born yesterday, but have a history of moving places. Again, I'll fix any weird developments after this, and select how the plates overlap.
  
• Altitude Feature Generation: This will be manual. Once I have my plates, their history, I can build this quite easily, but programming it appears to be too difficult for what it's worth.
  
• Initial Resource Seeding: Some materials are more abundant in mountainous or volcanic regions, so this is where I'll start distributed them.
• Height Interpolation: Smooth out the height and resources before interpolating into 1.3 million points(or more).
• Height Details: Add noise and smoothing to the map based on it's existing height and create hills(high random, low flow), plains(low random, high flow), valleys(high random, flow to sea), and islands(manual).
• Rainfall Map: Using Summer + Winter maps of wind and moisture flow maps, create a rainfall map.
• Water Drainage: Using the rainfall maps, predict where rivers and lakes will gather. Maybe find a way to simulate permable rock water flow... hehehe, probably not.
• Temperature Calculations: Using wind currents, ocean currents, and latitude, determine the temperature.
• Final Resources Seeding: Some materials are more abundant near water(like plants) or temperature.
• Final Map: For the final stage, I'll have a height map, river map, plantlife map, temperature map, and some material maps. I'll try to make a colorful map that incorporates all of this to finish the project.

I'm not sure if this belongs under the software forum(since it's heavily code-based), or the region world mapping forum(since it's still a world map, and is heavily manual as well), or what...

[jshoer]

Sounds ambitious! Having thought about doing this myself, I'll be curious to see how your algorithms work.

[Mathig]

Tectonic Plate generation and Plate movement are both up.

I swapped the pdf format to latex... and the thumbnail's for them seems to be gone. Feel free to click the black rectangles, I assure you they are safe pdf's. If anyone knows how to put the first page of a latex file as the thumbnail when it generates a pdf, let me know. I'm using texmaker, if that is relevant.

It'll be a while till I get back to this. I'll have some fine-tuning to do to the last pdf before moving on to manually creating mountains and such. At this point, though, I may scrap the current Pangea for another seed. Like I said, I intend to go back and forth. One note I found is that it doesn't look... Earthy, since my Pangea consists of nearly half the surface area.(Real Earth should be 1/3rd or so) This Pangea also has some issues with interlocking joints, and everything's just rather oversized in my opinion.

Please feel free to critique any of my algorithms, manual adjustments, assumptions, or the final images. It'd be nice to have some more adjustments to make before I start up a new iteration.

Regardless, up next I'll refresh all the existing pdf's and add in the next pdf, for mountains, volcanoes, and plateau's.

[Mathig]

I found time to work on this project. Yay! So, I decided to just go with my previous continent selection, but shrink it a bit horizontally. With that done, I used the maps movement that I've already generated to tell a story, and added in a few other minor details.

I seriously think something is wrong with the movement function, because all the continents looked really badly distorted after the move. I fixed the worst of it. I'll probably move on anyway, but if anyone has any ideas on how to clean it up, let me know.

Up next, I probably won't return for at least a couple weeks, but when I do, I'll probably combine the next two stages. Following that, the map will actually become a high resolution map, instead of 200x400.

[Falconius]

I think this is the appropriate forum, since techniques vary this is another variation. The pdf's are beyond my ken but the results sure are heading towards an interesting project.

[johnvanvliet]

Microsoft's " C#" will be a issue

i stopped using visual studio back in 2005
and do not use Microsoft dot net

all code snips would be in C and C++ or FORTRAN