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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.
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