6 ms·

Fantasy Map Generator (2018)

214 points by cjlm 5y ago

sklargh 5y ago
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.
Azgaar 5y ago
Hello. I'm the author. Please feel free to ask the questions if you have any
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099344 - Sept 2019 (36 comments) Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933765 - Sept 2018 (1 comment)
xbar 5y ago
Always charming. I have a World of Greyhawk enlarged and mounted on my wall.
drusepth 5y ago
Related: a list of similar map generators at https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators
- leprechaun1066 5y ago
  Also check out https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/ https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
  - xipho 5y ago
    Seconded. Highly recommended. Just beautiful stuff. Just started a series that includes code and approach, which makes it even more interesting IMO.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    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-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spacedcowboy 5y ago
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 https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape which sort of shows it off - basically it's a Unity engine "game" which lets you make landscapes.
- noduerme 5y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro
  - mjgoeke 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Reminds me of Bryce too... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software)
      - Datagenerator 5y ago
        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.
jokoon 5y ago
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.
- Azgaar 5y ago
  Please name all these similar generator. I don't know any that covers at least 50% of functionality.
- rickosborne 5y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY (That whole series of videos is interesting for anyone who has an interest in procedural generation and simulation.)
  - jokoon 5y ago
    It was abandonned
- y4mi 5y ago
dspillett 5y ago
A slightly older one that produces very nice looking results for certain aesthetics is https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/ 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)
Nerada 5y ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned donjon, well worth checking out if you haven't seen it before. https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/ https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/
joe__f 5y ago
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
- Azgaar 5y ago
  You can customize map size related to the globe size. By default the size is random, so may be pretty small
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Pretty cool. But changing to 3d or Globe in the Menu crashes my Firefox. Happened repeatedly, so gave up.

214 points by cjlm 5y ago

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.

Azgaar 5y ago

Hello. I'm the author. Please feel free to ask the questions if you have any

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099344 - Sept 2019 (36 comments) Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933765 - Sept 2018 (1 comment)

xbar 5y ago

Always charming. I have a World of Greyhawk enlarged and mounted on my wall.

drusepth 5y ago

Related: a list of similar map generators at https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators

leprechaun1066 5y ago
Also check out https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/ https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
- xipho 5y ago
  Seconded. Highly recommended. Just beautiful stuff. Just started a series that includes code and approach, which makes it even more interesting IMO.
- _Microft 5y ago
  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-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spacedcowboy 5y ago

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 https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape which sort of shows it off - basically it's a Unity engine "game" which lets you make landscapes.

noduerme 5y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro
- mjgoeke 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Reminds me of Bryce too... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software)
    - Datagenerator 5y ago
      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.

jokoon 5y ago

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.

Azgaar 5y ago
Please name all these similar generator. I don't know any that covers at least 50% of functionality.
rickosborne 5y ago
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 https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY (That whole series of videos is interesting for anyone who has an interest in procedural generation and simulation.)
- jokoon 5y ago
  It was abandonned
y4mi 5y ago

dspillett 5y ago

A slightly older one that produces very nice looking results for certain aesthetics is https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/ 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)

Nerada 5y ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned donjon, well worth checking out if you haven't seen it before. https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/ https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/

joe__f 5y ago

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

Azgaar 5y ago
You can customize map size related to the globe size. By default the size is random, so may be pretty small

jonnycomputer 5y ago

Pretty cool. But changing to 3d or Globe in the Menu crashes my Firefox. Happened repeatedly, so gave up.