[CF-Devel] Terrain generation

[Mark Wedel]

David Hurst wrote:
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      After looking at some of garbled's (Tim's) attempts at making a topographic map, njh told me to look at a program called terraform. For debian users apt-get install terraform, for the rest of the world 
      
      http://terraform.sourceforge.net/.
      
      
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      It creates topographic maps with heaps of cool options, you can use:
     
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      Perlin Noise
     
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      Spectral
     
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      Subdivision
     
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      Random
     
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      All of these look very convincing =). You can specifify x and y, and can even apply filters like erode. Not to slow down the work done by Mark and Tim, but isn't this sort of what you are trying to implement? Perhaps you could take some iedas from this or even use it =).
     
     
 A lot depends on what method we eventually go with to make the world.  A tool
like that is most useful if the world is completely generated, unique to each
server, as it lets the admin preview and tweak the worlds quite easily.

 other concerns I have would be how easy it would be integrate what we want it
to do (eg, write out map files).  In some sense, a perlin function is a perlin
function, so how it gets generated is not that big a deal.  At some level, a
command line utility that writes out a map file can be handy as someone can say
'try using these values', and everyone can do so.  Being that terraform is gnome
based, it can limit the number of people that want to use it (if you don't have
gnome installed, you may not want to just for that.)  And in some sense, it may
be overkill depending on what we want to do (eg, my simple program that writes
out ppm files is something like 100 lines long).  OTOH, if terraform supports a
method to write out elevation data in a simple format, then it would be easiest
to just write a program that then reads that out and writes out crossfire maps
from that data.  But in a quick glance, I didn't see any doc on the web page
which says what formats it writes out.