Planetoid World Gen with climate bands etc

[Cervator]

Some discussion on IRC that I missed (boo!) was brought to my attention and matches perfectly with some later stage musings I was hoping to see one day anyway. Also fits in perfectly as another item for this mid/long-term milestone!

1. Finite (but still relatively huge, like 64km x 64km, user configurable) cylinder world (possibly also deeper on the y-axis)
2. Climate bands to sort out biomes in a more natural fashion, also possibly larger (would incidentally also encourage more travel)
3. Nice overview maps generated on world creation akin to DF's "world map" - we have the TerrainPreviewGenerator already, unsure how big it scales

Useful links shared by @t3hk0d3:

• http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/
• http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/mapgen2.swf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram

Other niceties you could tie into it:

• Rivers, islands, oceans, and other large scale constructs
• Roads and civilizations (DF all over again!)
• (super duper sekkrit bonus item related to a long-term concept)

However, unlike in DF - you could stay in "fortress mode" even on the world map :D

[begla]

Keep those ideas in mind and save them for a later stage of development as additional terrain generators and game modes. Imho infinite terrain should still be one of the primary options though.

I've already got some similar algorithms ready written in C# (even utilizing volumetric terrain – visualized using Marching Cubes though) and they should be easily portable.

[Cervator]

Cool :-)

Yeah, I forgot to even mention different game modes. Could still do infinite, but the big but finite does seem to have some intriguing possibilities to it :-)