The Hexmap and Reality

I've been thinking about hex maps and outdoor adventures quite a bit recently, mostly because I've been working on a random terrain generator that, hopefully, will produce not-terrible maps. I decided to try an experiment, so... Take a look at this map and try to guess what it represents. The scale is 20 miles / square (yes I'm lazy and used stagger squares instead of hexes -- sue me). Terrain is:

• Pale green - plain
• Drab green - scrub
• Light green - light woods
• Dark green - forest
• Tan - hills
• Brown - mountains
• Light blue - wetland/coast
• Dark blue - ocean

Click for larger view

I'll post up the answer a bit later.

Random Hex Terrain II

Another map generated by the random generator I mentioned earlier today. This one started in wetlands, and  has a fair amount of ocean. I think it looks fairly solid, no real why is that there spots.

It's getting better. I've been visualizing these maps as 25 to 30 mile hexes, so about 375-400 miles across and 250-300 miles north-south.

Random Terrain Generator

I mentioned in a recent post that I was working on a set of random tables for terrain generation. The tables themselves aren't quite ready for use; at the moment they only exist as an Excel spreadsheet; but I did spend an hour to build a small test map. Once I had the raw map done on graph paper, I used Hexographer to create a legible map.

Guild Wars 2 - Scenery in 10,000 screenshots

Guild Wars 2 is an MMO currently in beta testing. One of the beta testers spent about eight hours taking close to 10,000 screenshots showing off the scenery of the game and edited them into a video stream. Worth a look if you want to see what the game looks like.

Paper Grid Things

I've been messing around with some terrain generation tables lately. Mostly aimed at building quasi-random hex maps. They're coming together into something kind of interesting, but they're not quite ready for prime time yet.

In the process of building these, I needed a few sheets of hex paper with over-sized hexes, so I could scribble some notes in each as I went about how I was using the terrain tables. I couldn't find any in my paper stash that was appropriate, so I went back to an old friend, Incompetech graph paper!

If you've never used this site, you should. The owner has a bunch of different options for building custom paper and spits out a PDF sheet according to your specifications. Grids, triangles, hexes, axonometric, polar, spider, brick, and more, plus a bunch of specialty stuff like note pads, musical scores, and storyboards.

It rocks. Bookmark it!

Homicide - Search Warrant

When we left our detectives, Evan and Jeff, they'd just gotten a preliminary report from the on-site forensics. I had planned to leave the scene and pursue one of the many leads floating around out there, but now I've decided to push ahead with the last bit of physical evidence here, searching the apartment of one of our suspects, Michelle Allen. We've already done the work to get a warrant for this, so in the interests of speeding the plot, I'm going to declare we've gotten it and are ready to go in, with Mike Lewis, the property manager, providing access.

Minecraft - Jungle Tree Farm

Done.