Originally Posted by J.Edward
Thanks ! Yeah I like the 3D view too. I am always amazed at the talent of the artists on these boards and I dont have the patience to hand draw it so I do cheat a lot with the procedural generation, and all my maps look the same because of it. But when I used to DM I did a lot of visuals to help the feel. It was quite cool to have the ability to view the landscape as you might be able to see it. So for me I like to have it in 3D and I also like to be able to get in close on the maps and so procedural gets you that.
If anyone is interested in seeing a bit more I believe there are a couple of youtube vids out there. I think the MeDem site is down now and they were on there. Oh yeah here they are on Monks YT page: https://www.youtube.com/user/monkschain
You are so right. When we did MeDem, Monks took the terrain he draw with a pen in vector then before I even saw it he ran it through wilbur for that specific purpose. I do have some fill options but instead of doing it like you do with a depression search and fill I let the water in and create sediment which fills up the ponds till they overflow but it will take a while for that to run. I might have a go with that and see what happens. It will probably alter the shape of the landscape a bit tho and I am not sure I can do that this time. I find it a lot easier to start with something vague and let the app determine what final shape it runs to and where the rivers go. Its hard work going from the final border shape and placed rivers back to 3D.
Monks and I always used to say that it would be best to "model in the rain" where you let the erosion and river formation happen whilst you pull up the landscape and then let the water do its thing for a while before altering it some more. But we know how much compute that would take. Possible, esp now with all the GPU grunt, but a lot of work to get that going.
I have wondered more recently if this new burst of AI development like with the TensorFlow could be trained to place rivers and stuff based on the height map or better yet in reverse where it could guess the height map from the river flow. You have a planet sized pile of training data from the real world to go on. Also wondered if similar kind of thing could be done for placing buildings in cities. I dont have the fire in my belly to devote myself to that any more.
Hah yeah, but then I would spend the rest of my days replying to people as to why they churn out deserts all day long and nothing grows in their land. I'd be a slave to it. My program is so hard to use that once, when I got really ****ed with it, I fired up the code debugger and had to break point on it to look at what the hell was going on cos I had some parameters out of whack. Its a nightmare to use. Seriously bad. Its all text based scripty stuff with no UI at all. Its about as easy to use as cracking a safe. The texture shader is quite cool tho. Although thats also text based its not so bad and I like that a lot. But even then, Monks tried it and found it hard work. I write useful programs that nobody but me can use !
I did release for free the 3D viewer which is what I use and what that image was done with. I think most of us oldies know about it but if your new then you can get it. You need a height map (bitmap BMP file or HF2 file) and some colour map for it. But its still online here: http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/cgi-bin/vi...dragons_flight
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