[MUD-Dev] Terrain/Landmass & GIF/BMP

quzah quzah
Wed Oct 7 14:49:03 CEST 1998


Greetings everyone,

While I normally just post uninteresting responses, it is
mow my turn to request a bit of help. I have two questions
that I am hoping you as a whole can help me a bit with.

The first is this: I am developing a world generator of
sorts, that with a few parameters will generate the entire
mud world. It will take into account the following info:
   sizeX (width of world west to east)
   sizeY (length of world north to south)
   clustering (continents/small islands/large islands/etc)
   "hillyness" (flat/small hills/mountains/etc)
   mineral richness (frequency of mineral deposits)
   temperature (over all cold/mild/warm/hot/etc)
   on land water supplies (rivers/lakes/etc [amount of])
   wetness (over all very dry/dry/moderate/damp/very wet/etc)

Now then, I am using 16 height levels (0 and 15 are unreachable
depth and height respectively) ( 7 and 8 are sea level at_below/
at_above respectively). What I am unsure of what/how to do is
the "cluster effect" for my land masses. I want to be able to
generate random height/depth terrain based on clustering+hilly+
sizeY+sizeX+wetness using the 14 available depth/height levels.

Does anyone know a link or quick formula I could look at to do
something along these lines? I can just toss out random +/- to
a given coordinate, and check its neighbors to make sure there
is not too big a jump, but I think that would be inefficient
and or ineffective in the long run. Any suggestions?

(For rivers I plan on using heuristics for getting from point
A (river source) to point B (river mouth) but I haven't looked
at it too in depth. Finally I believe I have managed to locate
the actual formula for "A*" so I may see what I can do with it
at a later date.)


The second question/problem I have that I'm hoping I can get
a bit of help with is this:

After finally generating a world mass, I need a way to "see"
what it looks like. Even on a very small world (500x1000) in
ASCII form, it will be very very hard to get an over all look
at the world. I was thinking that if there is a simple way to
output to a GIF or BMP, then I'd be able to just open up the
picture in a paint program and "see" what the world looks
like. Does anyone know of any good links that explain how to
output either "x number of bits" or "x number of bytes" to a
GIF or BMP? (PCX would even work). Currently, each piece of
info on the land mass takes up 20 bits, so I can either drop
it down to 16 bits, or bump it up to 32 bits for the use of
GIF/BMP (Yeah, I know GIF is 8bits, I THINK I can lower it
enough to be able to use a GIF format).

Anyway, if anyone can help, you have my thanks (if you have
a better idea for either of these, feel free to let me know
your thoughts on the matters). Thanks in advance.
-Q-





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