[crossfire] weather, lattitude, town location, and the world

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
>
      On 11/11/05, Anton Oussik <
      antonoussik at gmail.com
      > wrote:
     >>
      On 11/11/05, Lalo Martins <
      lalo.martins at gmail.com
      > wrote:
     >>>
      Hmm.  Maybe "bigworld" is not big at all :-P Brendan's calculations
     >>>
      still make sense to me generally, except that now I'm thinking about
     >>>
      one-chain-wide mountains and finding them a bit silly.  But that can
     >>>
      pass, since those are relatively rare.
     >>
      Such rock formations may actually be possible, wih a hard surface and
     >>
      wind and such. Since the planet is not Earth and since we are willing
     >>
      to accept teleportation and beds to reality, then why not small
     >>
      naturally occuring rock formations?
     >
     
     >
      These /do/ exist in the real world, a quick google turned up
     >
      
      http://home.bawue.de/~jjk/travel/Urlaub%202002/Canyonlands/Needles%202.png
      
     >
     
     >
      They don't look like they occupy much more than a tenth of an acre.
     >
      Of course, arguably they should be called rock formations, and not
     >
      mountains, but that is a different point.
     
  The other gotcha on those as related to crossfire is that if they are just 
spikes of rock, you'd walk around them, thus they should not adversely affect 
movement like mountains do.

>
     
     >
      Personally I would say that if bigworld were not already established,
     >
      it would be nicer to use a height map, so that each square would have
     >
      a height associated with it, and then whether they are hill, mountain,
     >
      plain, river or desert could be inferred from the height values (the
     >
      areas that cities are currently on would need to be flat, with a
     >
      depression to the side with between them and the nearest sea facing
     >
      mountains, to redirect the resulting river).
     >
     
     >
      This would have the added advantage of reducing the size of the
     >
      bigworld maps download, although at a cost of slower startup time.
     
  The problem is that it is desirable in lots of cases to actually set up 
specific terrain.

  Way back when the bigworld was created, there were discussions related to 
making it more dynamic, but it was basically decided that having the map more 
static was desirable.

  that said, when the world was created, a perlin function was used to create an 
altitude map, and based an altitude, different terrain types were assigned.

  That of course isn't very realistic.  Around here, we have coastal mountians 
that are only a few thousand feet high.  And there are high forests.  Crossfire 
is somewhat limited by only 1 aspect of terrain is available (we don't have 
forested mountains for example).

  All that said, if we were to create another continent and wanted to start with 
an automatic process, there are many improvments I can think of:

1) Create altitude map (with different seed of course) like did before.
2) Based on that altitude map, run weather on it for a long time (elevation <0 
is of course see).  This gets us rainfall & temperature for different spaces.

  Then with that, you can do most of what you state:

  With that info, you can then have some idea what goes on each space.  Spaces 
with <5" rainfall would be desert/tundra (based on temperature).  One could do 
some basic erosion.  Water has to go somewhere, so that determines rivers, 
lakes, and marshes (lakes would basically be formed when the total water flowing 
into a set of spaces is above some amount and that set of space(s) is 
constrained by higher objects around that would hold the water.

  Mountains should probably be determined if the elevation is above some height. 
  But low mountains are also possible, but that should be done based on 
different of elevation of neighboring spaces - if a space is say 1000' different 
in elevation from its neighbors, it is a mountain.

  similar for mountains, but no height - just height difference (in the 250-500' 
range?).

  Otherwise, type of terrain is determined by weather and rainfall.  jungle 
requires high rainfall and warm temperatures, etc.