Just a quick update to show that things are moving. The process of converting all of the regional-level generation to the new spherical planets continues, though a lot more slowly than I'd like. This is partly because of dealing with the roundness, but also because I'm trying to improve the routines as I go and (crucially) speed them up wherever possible. Speed is more important than it was with the old version, because the engine needs to be able to generate and place regional areas on the globe in real-time as the user moves around.
Anyway, I've more or less got rivers and lakes working, which has been as difficult as ever. But I think the rivers are looking quite reasonable:
I've also found a way to do rift lakes a lot more simply than before. I've adapted my approach to non-rift large lakes. The idea is this: create an elevation map where all the seed heights (at the corners of the tiles) are above a certain elevation, and where all points where a large river runs through what will be rift lakes are well below that elevation. Diamond-square it, and then treat all areas that end up below that elevation as templates for rift lakes. That gives results like this:
As always, there are still lots of bugs to iron out. And I haven't been able to get deltas to work at all on the spherical maps, so I'm going to have to rethink those. But it's coming on!
