Height-Map Generation Seems Complete (for now at least)

I have come to a place which is at least minimally acceptable to me in my height-map generation routine. At the moment I am generating 3d simplex noise onto a 2-d plane with the persistence value set to simplex noise and the z-slice value set to simplex noise as well, which creates both smooth and choppy environments and pretty interesting looking land-masses, mountain ridges, lakes, and whatnot - the thing I need to do next in regards to my height-map and terrain generation is to figure out what values I can use that will generate branching tendrils and use that to modify in some river systems. I am sure creating branching tendrils is possible, but if it is not or if I can not get it to look appropriate, I will have to fall back on my old river-generating code, which can be easily adaptable to the scaleable terrain I have now. And I need to do something like that for roads and trails anyways.

http://www.geocities.com/muertal/Muert_alpha_03_b_01.zip

Screen Shots:
http://www.geocities.com/muertal/muert_pix1.gif
http://www.geocities.com/muertal/muert_pix3.gif
http://www.geocities.com/muertal/muert_pix4.gif
http://www.geocities.com/muertal/muert_pix5.gif


Nothing special going on yet - but I have fixed up my terrain generation a bit, added in some FOV for the local view and added back in the vegetation overview, which is viewable in the region and local views - the local view forests look pretty nice and seem to be distributed in an approprate manner so far; once I get the detailed vegetation view and plant species working, all the other weird plants that are in my texture will be showing up in game with fruit/ vegetables/ other useful items available to be had from them. Then people can actually start eeking (etching? ecking? whatever that word is) out a life in this unforgiving, vast and empty wilderness.

I also fixed the effect my random seed has on my world generation. Now it actually does have an effect, and generates completely different worlds instead of the same thing with maybe an extremely minor difference here and there (the vegetation generation was messed up in the previous versions too and would ignore the seed, which caused trees to sprout up and wither away to nothing around you while walking - Respect The Random Seed!)

Also because I have not fixed FOV with regards to neighboring, but currently loaded local maps, it looks like you are walking around individual local maps, and only enter another map when you walk off the edge of your current local map. That will not be too hard to fix, I just need to tell FOV about the different localmaps and make it process negative #'s and > than LMAP_X or Y #'s.


For a quick start - when the game starts you will be in the options screen
you can make the text larger by going to textmultiplier option and pressing right or l or something
or

press ESC
and arrive at the start screen
press enter to start a game and the world will be generated
once it has generated
press ctrl-P
that will generate a person - move away from the edge of the map with the arrow keys
walk towards some land (the non-blue squares)
press shift-. (or >)
this will make you zoom in from the world map view to the region map view -
the nw, ne, sw & se quadrants of the region map view correspond with 4 neighboring
world map squares. The quadrant you are standing in now is part of the world map
square you were standing in before you pressed > - from here you can walk around
or you can find some land (in case you are over some water) and zoom in again
press shift-. (or >)
this will make you zoom in from the region map view to the local map view -
the blah blah - just like the region map view above - each square in the
region map view equals LMAP_X x LMAP_Y (whatever it is set to in
settings.txt) - you can run around the region map view and see all the trees & bushes
and swamps & shores & mountains, - but you won't find anybody else yet.

press shift-, (or <) to zoom out to the region map view and from there to the world map view (which does not look very useful at the moment)