Fantasy Map Generator (FMAP)

Overview

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Fast-Fortran-Fantasy Maps (FMAP) is an experimental tool for generating fantasy world maps quickly. The goal is to write a relatively simple tool that produces physically believable maps without the need for full-fledged Earth system models. The approach is to mathematically imitate nature where possible, and impose only a few, simplified physics-informed rules.

Implementation

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The worlds are built by successively adding layers of complexity. First, tectonic plates are imitated through voronoi cells. These are tagged as oceanic or continental. Mountain ranges are added where expected. Topographic noise is added, smoothed, and landscapes are modified by river incision.

Tectonic plates are imitated by voronoi cells. You can choose between Manhattan over Euclidean distance and a flat, cylindrical, torus or spherical world shape to draw the cells. The continents on the left are generated using the the torus shape (seamless texturing) and Manhattan distance. The world on the right is spherical, and the cells are generated using the Euclidean distance.

You can set the % of the surface to be covered by oceans. This will make the world generator assign different densities to tectonic plates. Dark grey represents oceans, while lighter grey represents land. Plate movement is randomly initialised and then balanced.

Topography is generated based on differences in plate velocity vectors. Then, topographic falloff into the continent interiors and to the coasts are created (and can be controlled through 2 separate parameters). Topography is then offset randomly by a specified amount and smoothed with a moving average. Finally, small-scale topographic etching/noise is added before a river incision model is applied.

Development

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Code

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All code is open-source and permissively licenced under MIT.