• Welcome to SC4 Devotion Forum Archives.

Southlands Region Heightmap

Started by DDR, September 08, 2011, 03:35:40 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

DDR

Hello.

I've been working on a little procedurally-generated region heightmap lately. Here it is in-game:


Here's the full satellite view:


And here's the city boundaries:

(Sorry for the scum of civilization on the previous two images - I can't find the proper region picture I took before I started building.)

Skip this next paragraph if you want, it's the design ramble.
The idea behind the region is that it should look fairly natural, while still being interesting and playable. I think the mountains are not realistically eroded, but I'm going to call it a sacrifice to gameplay. Sans erosion, there were no interesting passes. &Thk/( The region mellows towards the eastern seaboard, with cities having very little slope at all. This is where I started out, since it's simpler that way. However, for those of you who like a bit of terrain, the mountains out west should be interesting. (I've not had a chance to test them yet, though, they might need tweaking. Please, tell me if they do!) I've gone to no small effort to make the interface regions between water and land buildable, so that you can place ferries and beaches along the water's edge without having to extensively terraform around them. However, in the flatlands to the east, you will need to flatten in from some deeper water in some areas. The edge is extremely gentle, but ferry traffic can navigate the waters just fine. In addition, it is not too hard to build bridges in this region despite the large amount of water, since I've tried to have the rivers mostly flow in the cardinal directions.

In addition, since the region is generated and not drawn, I could theoretically make a much, much bigger heightmap. Not more detailed, but actually /bigger/. More mountains, more rivers, etc. Would anybody be interested?

Here is the city layout definition: (you may need to convert this to a colour .bmp)


Here is the region heightmap: (you may need to convert this to a greyscale-mode .bmp)


Unfortunately, since I cannot upload files to this forum, these images are all hosted on PasteAll.org at the moment. I will upload them to LEX when I can, since it too is down for the count. They will expire in ~5 months.