Brought up Experilous Worldbuilder yesterday and I saw some people were interested. The thread died overnight, so I'm bringing it back. Give it a go and see what you can make.
experilous.com
You can create a world from a seed and some parameters, including moisture, ocean level, temperature, and tectonics. There's also potential for under-the-hood customization, though that's beyond my grasp. In all, it's an interesting tool.
Are there any worldbuilding tools you recommend?
Other urls found in this thread:
giss.nasa.gov
donjon.bin.sh
experilous.com
twitter.com
A globe is fine, but is hardly practical for real use in a campaign. There are a few map projections in Worldbuilder, but I'm not a big fan of them. Here's a 2:1 equirectangular projection of the world I made.
From here, I can use this tool to convert the map to one of over 100 representations. giss.nasa.gov
Most of the projections look way too impractical for campaign purposes. I want something that minimizes distortion, but is aesthetically pleasing and accessible to players. I import the equirectangular map, pick Eckert IV, and adjust the center.
I think the result is something accessible, practical, and interesting to look at. This particular world has a lot of land, all connected, but with natural borders from many huge mountain ranges. There are a few islands, too. Since Worldbuilder lacks rivers and lakes, I would paint those in myself.
donjon.bin.sh
-gm/map aids
I had seen a friend use the Pathfinder dungeon generator to good effect. I didn't know there were so many other utilities. It's worth bookmarking. Here's something whipped up from the fantasy world generator. Welcome to "Linande".
I tried a few different things, but I'm not immediately impressed by the terrain generation. It looks great for making something quick, though. City placement looks good. Plenty of points of interest. It's all laid out for me.
The aforementioned friend had not noticed donjon's worldbuilding features, either. He just generated this world, with a lot of land. With a few personal touches, this will be the map we're working with in a Pathfinder campaign.
We'll start at a Pathfinder Society lodge, near Taham, middle-left. Some of the name generation is terrific. The Ghostlight Woods, The Desert of the Wanderer, The Stronghold of Broken Worlds.
To make a world with more islands, increase the number of tectonic plates. This one uses 128. I also increased the amount of ocean, and moisture. The planet will still have plenty of variety in its environments, but is generally more tropical.
I've noticed problems regenerating the world when tweaking some settings, particularly ocean. The result often looked nothing like the initial seed. Selecting "Regenerate All" resolved that for me.
I'm working on a procedural generator right now actually, but it's still super prototypy.
I'm trying to use rough simulations of physical processes (like Experilous does), so I'm creating tectonic plates, having them collide, simulating wind circulation for distribution of moisture, etc.
Mine's just 2D though and is essentially a cylinder instead of a sphere (wraps only in x direction). Like you mention here I'm not a fan of the way spherical projections distort the map for practical purposes, even if it is more realistic.
This image is the biome map, I'm working on rivers right now so the black dots are potential river sources.
I'm not even sure people will like this style of generator but hopefully I'll be able to release it eventually.
Damn that looks awesome. Going to open the source?
Looks really nice, user. I'd be interested in seeing it.
I gotta say I'm not a fan of Experilous's hydrographics results, they look odd to my eye. Like how come there's so many broad dry bands inbetween the oceans and the green all the time? How is the rain skipping over the coast in so many regions?
Also Experilous is proprietary and windows-only, which gnu/sucks.
Thanks!
To be honest while I've done some basic programming I'm not particularly well versed in it, so I'm not 100% sure what the overall implications of open-sourcing are. Plus my code right now is definitely inefficient and I probably need to rewrite the whole thing so I haven't really thought much about it.
Here's another image. This is from an earlier version (before I did some biome tweaking), so it's not really representative of where I'm at, but at least it's an example of terrain shapes my prototype is producing.
The implications are basically just that your code belongs to you, but others can collaborate with you on improving it. If you want, you can have them assign you the copyright on bits of code they send, but it's considered a little rude, because it means you hope to resell their work later.
It also means while others could hypothetically try to sell your code, they can't package it up as a secret sauce and pretend it's theirs, they have to give you credit, show their changes and allow you to get the source code they're using and build it yourself, otherwise you can sue their asses to oblivion, and the FSF's legal team will likely help. If they want to repackage it and sell it like widgets, they'll need to get permission from all copyright holders, which means you can all demand payment.
(Selling open source code is difficult and requires you to do some kind of value added service because why would someone pay you when they can just get the code for free?)
Also, as a guy with experience in the field: be wary of rewriting. Refactoring in place is almost always faster and better. I've seen so many projects die when The Big Rewrite idea hit them.
>Refactoring in place is almost always faster and better.
So. Much. This.
If you didn't start with a solid architecture or design doc and you don't have one now what makes you think a rewrite is going to end up so much better that the time spent is worth it compared to implementing new features in the existing design.
Yep, you take that working spaghetti code and carefully untangle that shit. It's a pain, but it's still easier than writing a whole new one that won't be spaghetti too.
Well sounds like refactoring is the way to go. I'll take y'all's word for it since everyone seems to be in such agreement.
Like I said I'm not a super experienced programmer and so I don't always know best practices. Appreciate the suggestions and advice about open sourcing.
>not a super experienced programmer
Keep doing it. Get feedback on what you do. Level up. Win.
It's cool to see someone here working on this type of project. I'd like to try out your generator sometime.
You might be interested in looking at Experilous's code.
Bumping
Tried out another mostly-land world. Only 50% ocean, lower moisture. The result are some long gulfs of desert, with just a few jungles and forests as well.
Polar caps seem huge but I guess it's not actually that unrealistic
Yeah, and part of that depends on map representation, different projections will distort especially the poles a lot, but in this case, I think it was just the world generation.
It's a bit weird, seeds seem change the amount of ice at the poles, even though heat is a factor. I could explain it away that much of the ocean's water is frozen at the poles.
So here's that same world with an even higher temperature, you can see the poles have receded, and actually some of the greenery has receded as well. But this is as far as it goes. The polar icecaps for this generation are apparently very big.
And here's that world with the default heat level.
Huh, I wonder why that is. It does seem strange that the default heat value would give ice caps that large.
But it probably also depends on how the wind is generated. I've read a blog post by Experilous' creator before that said heat (and moisture) gets moved around based by air currents. So maybe his wind model tends to blow away from the poles? I don't know anything about actual Earth wind patterns so I don't know how accurate that is.
I wouldn't know, myself, but the web-embedded Planet Generator actually shows off wind currents.
experilous.com
I'm not sure what features exist in the paid version of Worldbuilder, but even if wind can't be visualized in the demo, it makes sense that he's using that for distribution of moisture and heat. I'll take a look at the blog.
I've always found drawing continents by hand to be better for worldbuilders than any generator. That's why I like the Inkarnate worldbuilder when I need to make a rough and dirty draft of a map, but I still prefer to make them in Photoshop.
It was so good to see Inkarnate actually received an update recently. I thought it was an abandoned project.
Got a github link for us yet?
I got bored and drew this. New GM here. Ignore the names, they're just random stuff, and I didn't spend any time on the calligraphy at all
Those fjords are gorgeous.
thank you desu