This is amazing!
This motivates me to do so many things... alas, none related to my day job.
Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#22If you like making fiction maps by hand (but not fantasy maps) - have a look at this great mapping project: Open Geo Fiction: http://www.opengeofiction.net
From the about page: "This world is set in modern times, so it doesn't have orcs or elves, but rather power plants, motorways and housing projects. But also picturesque old towns, beautiful national parks and lonely beaches. "
It's essentially a fictional OpenStreetMap, and actually uses all the same stack as OSM, with all the data as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#23Reminds me of a bit in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a MMORPG company hired a team of geologists to generate a geologically plausible map for their game. The hardest part of their job was finding ways to integrate the parts of the world that had been made up without any regard geology and made no sense in their model.
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#24Well done. I need to explore this later but well-done
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#25Reminds me of a bit in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a MMORPG company hired a team of geologists to generate a geologically plausible map for their game. The hardest part of their job was finding ways to integrate the parts of the world that had been made up without any regard geology and made no sense in their model.
Reamde was the book if any are interested.
A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated.
The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint for him.
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#26I too, like the author, often was more interested in the topography and maps of fantasy stories. This is awesome!
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#27This is really cool. I'm going to bookmark this and look in to it more in-depth. I've always wondered about how to generate maps for a game. Good job.
reddit.com/r/worldbuilding is an excellent community for such things as well
Has that improved lately? I stopped reading it ages ago, when it was turning into /r/PhotosOfSplotchyWallpaper - lots and lots of low-effort pareidolia with no filtering (downvotes disabled IIRC).
And don't get me started on the rivers...
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#28Reminds me of a bit in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a MMORPG company hired a team of geologists to generate a geologically plausible map for their game. The hardest part of their job was finding ways to integrate the parts of the world that had been made up without any regard geology and made no sense in their model.
Reamde was the book if any are interested. A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated. The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint…
Cast in another light, it was standard Stephenson fare -- the first half of the book explores a topic deeply and interestingly, then the second half basically sets it aside to trail off into some weird no-man's land. Seveneves was particularly obvious version of this issue.
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#29If the novels were as bad as he says they were, maybe he can crank out some random(ly bad) prose to go with it, and get Amazon-rich. (And/or, this might make an interesting companion project.)
What's the best long-form text generator that can produce something beyond your average CompSci Markov chain results?
You might not need to pass the Turing test, but even getting the "Eye of Argon" out of something random would be pretty impressive.
Re: Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
#30This is sooo cool! Thanks for sharing!!