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+> I have a programmer's superstitions about always using powers of 2, which are more
+> pleasing to the spirit of the machine.
+-mewo2, whose sentiment I share
+
+
+grid generation
+---------------
+
+The basic sequence is:
+
+ - pick N random points
+ - relax them a lil
+ - generate their voronoi diagram
+
+Picking N random points it quite straightforward. For relaxation, I indent to just step
+over MxM points, get the closest of the set of N, and compute the averages to get the
+centroids. This, again, should be quite simple. Voronoi generation is then just a
+matter of using rhill's library.
+
+
+terrain generation
+------------------
+
+mewo2 does this automatically; I'd like to do it interactively. Their primitives list
+is helpful to me though! I'd like to have "brushes" for these things, so that you can
+pick a radius and strength and then just go to town adding features.
+
+ - constant slope: not entirely sure how this would work (pick a point and make things
+ slope from there to the center?)
+ - cones: pretty solid imo
+ - round blobs: also pretty solid
+ - relax: lerp with the average of neighboring points, with the lerp strength relative
+ to brush strength and radius.
+ - round: same as relax, but lerp with a point's own square root.
+
+Normalization seems probably superfluous -- we'd like to be able to have really tall
+mountains and stuff, and it could also make some of the other operations a bit weird
+(like having stuff that was previously land disappear under water while building a
+mountain).
+
+One thing to keep in mind is the effect of map scaling on brush radius size. I think I'd
+like to have the visual radius stay the same size, and shrink the internal radius to
+match it.
+
+Rivers and erosion are interesting -- I may want to have an "erosion" and "rain" brush
+to generate these features.
+
+
+rendering
+---------
+
+tba, not sure what I want to do here
+
+
+additional features
+-------------------
+
+I want to take the same approach as OpenStreetMap and have all other features (and
+possibly even some, like rivers) be *nodes*, that exist independently of the terrain
+grid. These can be zero-, one-, or two-dimensional. Each node should exist on a *layer*,
+so that different layers can be viewed at any given time. Additionaly, nodes may be
+assigned a relevance level, which corresponds to the scale required to view them. The
+highest-level nodes are only visible when broadly zoomed out, and reflect things like
+major cities, nations, and large-scale geographic features. The lowest-level nodes
+would represent things like individual buildings and only be visible when highly zoomed in.
+
+Node should be able to indicate things like climate regions or land use patterns as well,
+and those kinds of nodes should be on their own layers, so that the user can view or
+ignore relevant data at any time.