Tinkering with tools

Now that the actual terrain generation is mostly done (barring a few bugs, of course), I've been messing about with the UI, and I've added two new features that I've wanted to add for a while.

The first is the ability to change the colours and other settings used to generate the relief maps:

As you can see, you can change all the colours (thanks to the stylish colour wheel that comes with Nanogui), and also change the strength (and direction) of the shading, as well as the marbling effect and how many rivers will be shown. This allows the user to customise the look of their maps to quite a high degree from within the app. The settings stay with the world if you save it and load it later, and you can also save the settings themselves to apply to another world if you want to.

The second new feature is the ability to generate, and export, maps drawn to regional scale but of larger areas. The user can simply mark out an area on the global map that they'd like detailed maps of, and UW will draw the maps and save them to the hard drive. (You can't view them within UW, but you can of course open them in whatever other program you like.) So you can have maps like these:

That last image is pretty huge (3441x2017 pixels)! (It has the shading on land cranked up to maximum too.) As you can see, it's now possible to create detailed maps of entire continents if you so choose, as long as you don't mind waiting for them (the last one took a couple of minutes). It might in theory be possible to create a detailed map of the entire world, but I haven't tried...

The only feature left to add is the ability to import your own heightmap and have UW turn it into a complete world, including working out all the climates and rivers and so on. Some people have requested this, and I'd like to add it, but it would be a little complicated because I need to work out how to do mountains. (Remember, Undiscovered Worlds' mountains are not simply areas of high elevation on the heightmap - UW also stores ridge directions and connections, which are additional data. So I need to think of a way to create that data from raw heightmaps.) I want to avoid feature creep, so I may leave this to add at a later date, after I've released the first version. If I do that, then once I've squashed the more prominent of the remaining bugs and worked out how to actually create a standalone app, I'll be in a position to release it and let other people play with it.