Well, that and the fact that everything was so far apart that the main trilogy spent more pages talking about walking than talking about events :D
Your success is inspiring, and I've forked your repo(s) to try and continue your work. Thank you so much!
Keep making, keep sharing!
From the about page: "This world is set in modern times, so it doesn't have orcs or elves, but rather power plants, motorways and housing projects. But also picturesque old towns, beautiful national parks and lonely beaches. "
It's essentially a fictional OpenStreetMap, and actually uses all the same stack as OSM, with all the data as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Update: And there are so many like that --- incredibly detailed, ordered and organic!
Somewhere I have a WinForms app I built a while back that animates the process and draws everything out step by step.
The way it works is that for every city, town etc you generate a few placement candidates (4 positions around the point like you do seems fine) and then calculate all the pairs of placements that collide. For each collision you add a clause to a SAT formula that forbids this combination from occurring. Every solution of this formula will be a clean labeling of your map.
Furthermore, SAT is hard in theory but the kind of very structured instances found in practice tend to respond well to heuristics.
A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated.
The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint for him.
BTW, this is a quick way to generate an higher resolution map on the site. Open the developer tools, remove the width from .note (it's the container of the column), inspect the map at the bottom and set the height and width of the canvas to suit your needs. Then click on the Generate button.
Maybe the page could be changed to extract that canvas from the column layout and make it fit the viewport.
EDIT -
Oooo and it's MIT...
I made multiple tools for random world generation but never come close to this kind of quality. I'm impressed!
Nice work!
And don't get me started on the rivers...
(And/or, this might make an interesting companion project.)
You might not need to pass the Turing test, but even getting the "Eye of Argon" out of something random would be pretty impressive.
You should look at how that game does it because it also involves creating a whole mythology and history to help generate civilizations and their fall/rise.
An ambitious project: take in fantasy novels and extract location cues from them, then draw a map. Find text which mentions a place, then try to recognize phrases which express distance and direction.
Here is my try on paths generation: http://imgur.com/CUs6P4S
https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson-siggraph07-pois...
Does anyone have a nice pointer toward those?
Will definitely share if I manage it
We didn't use Fortune's for historical reasons (the first versions of the code were in Fortran 77, and written well before he published his paper). Instead we generated triangulations and then flipped edges until they were Delaunay, and then used the corresponding Voronoi diagram. It turns out that flipping edges to produce a nicer triangulation is reasonable in two dimensions, but intractable in 3D and up.
