Earth Map Script It Alive!

I completed the first full test run of the Earth Map generator.  You may remember the beginning stages of this back in 2018 before shelving it for another project.  Well, today I finished it off and successfully loaded the first full Earth map into EDCE with success.  The screenshot attached to this post if the overview map from in-game, which I’ll also be uploading to the Steam Community shortly as well.

The map uses a terrain generator that draws land masses according to publicly available GPS vectors.  The results you see are based on a mix of foliage and height maps along with a GPS-based ecosystem map.  EDCE has fewer terrain options than real-world biomes, so I used dual coordinate triangulation at 50km2 and then merged the results to determine the tile type.  This means the map was fully AI generated with only a small handful of manual corrections made to place some missing shallow water tiles.

That’s the good.  The bad is the script was a bit too perfect in it’s generation.  The image attached looks almost like a bad GIF.  That’s because it was too precise when it generated some of the items, namely the hills and mountains.  I’m going to soften up the script and do some tweaking to the vegetation formula’s so forests don’t appear as single dots.  The result should be smoother transitions with less single tile artifacts.  This map also lacks proper river networks which will have to be layered on top since that data comes from another data set.

Then there is the ugly.  I also had an issue that caused the script to freeze over Antarctica.  This could be an indicator to a larger problem, but for now I’m keeping my hopes high.  I think the mix of white washed out the height map, which should be a simple fix.

Another ugly occurrence was the decision to paint the Outback as all rough hilly terrain.  This is technically the truth I suppose, but for game play purposes I have to modify the script to recognize it more of a desert.  It also painted a large gray wall of hills in the Midwestern US.  This is too much, as it effectively becomes an impenetrable helicopter wall, and I don’t mean the real one that is further to the west.

I give it a week or two and this script should be in a playable form, as long as I don’t get more real life distractions.  Last week was rough for me, being caught in the middle of flu season as well as a crunch of after hours work.