Beyond the waves of the sea

Good morning again. Yesterday was one of those days where I did make a little progress building the world, but most of the effort went in conceptual improvements. Not do much actual code. 

Firstly, what did I make? Well, this.

What you're looking at is the beginnings of some ragged mountain range. For testing purposes, I have these coloured textures that indicate height on the level. Brown posts are the higher regions. In the brown part, there's a bunch of spikes popping up. These are random points that I rose to a level where they're easy to see. They are going to be the basis for more ragged mountains. Those are the peaks.  I'll write more about that once it gets under way.

Secondly, the ideas. I found out a problem in my wrapping system. When the left tile its not nearly the same height as three rightmost one, there is a lot of space to cover to make the right one connect. This can give weird results:

The leftmost tile is a sea tile and this tile on the picture is highlands. To connect, the needs to be a steep drop which does not look right. For that reason, I'm changing the wrapping system. If you look away the world map (of earth) there's two points pg interest here: the sea East of Iceland and the Bering Straight between Siberia and Alaska. From there, there's a pretty simple line of ocean going from the north pole to the south pole.

What I'm going to do is stimulate something like that. The world I'm generating will be surrounded by low regions on the east and west side. That'll be oceans. I think this will fix the problem described above without making it look unnatural. I might even put water around there poles to, but probably with extra generated land masses or ice sheets. Have not decided yet.

I do know how to make the surrounding ocean. That'll be by mixing the height map with a noise that has low values around the edges and high ones in the center. I'm not sure about the algorithm yes, but it should be feasible and I've seen this before. I'll probably make that first because it's not very difficult.

I'm also going off for a long weekend from Friday to Monday, so there probably won't be much work then.  Maybe a blog when I have one of these Eureka moments, but don't count on it. You'll never know, but the laptop stays home,  except if you're a thief. I'm taking my laptop (which I always refer to as"slow" and "crappy") totally with me.