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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Random Coastlines, Rivers, and Roads
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<blockquote data-quote="Schmoe" data-source="post: 6905246" data-attributes="member: 913"><p>I agree that generating rivers on the fly is probably not very effective. A river is really a feature of existing terrain, not the terrain itself, and as such it seems like you'd want to go back and fill in rivers only after the terrain has been generated. You could do this using a random percentage per hex that you've found a river, but once you find a river you would want to extend it upstream and downstream using some other method. You can certainly have rivers that dry up, or vanish into cracks in the earth, or some other termination, and headwaters can be practically anywhere, so random termination of the river both upstream and downstream would probably work, but you would want it heavily weighted toward having a source in highlands or lakes, and a terminus in a large body of water.</p><p></p><p>Coastlines are a little bit different in that, by definition, they <em>must</em> extend in two directions. You can't just have a single coastline hex in the middle of nowhere. If you are generating terrain procedurally and come across a coastline I'd recommend immediately extending the coastline a fair distance so that you can determine the extent of the land mass. Similar to rivers, coastline can be thought of as not really the terrain itself, but the limit of the terrain. You can certainly use random methods to extend the coastline, but you'll probably need to limit the random results so that it doesn't cut across terrain you've already generated.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Schmoe, post: 6905246, member: 913"] I agree that generating rivers on the fly is probably not very effective. A river is really a feature of existing terrain, not the terrain itself, and as such it seems like you'd want to go back and fill in rivers only after the terrain has been generated. You could do this using a random percentage per hex that you've found a river, but once you find a river you would want to extend it upstream and downstream using some other method. You can certainly have rivers that dry up, or vanish into cracks in the earth, or some other termination, and headwaters can be practically anywhere, so random termination of the river both upstream and downstream would probably work, but you would want it heavily weighted toward having a source in highlands or lakes, and a terminus in a large body of water. Coastlines are a little bit different in that, by definition, they [i]must[/i] extend in two directions. You can't just have a single coastline hex in the middle of nowhere. If you are generating terrain procedurally and come across a coastline I'd recommend immediately extending the coastline a fair distance so that you can determine the extent of the land mass. Similar to rivers, coastline can be thought of as not really the terrain itself, but the limit of the terrain. You can certainly use random methods to extend the coastline, but you'll probably need to limit the random results so that it doesn't cut across terrain you've already generated. [/QUOTE]
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