Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator (2018)

azgaar.github.io

470 pointsharperlee36 comments

If you like these country maps, you'll probably also appreciate: https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

> This application generates a random medieval city layout of a requested size.

Likewise, it is web-based and interactive

Even better, the cities on Azgaar's maps link to Oleg's (watabou's) maps! Click on a city name and then click the "folded map" icon. It will create a city that matches the environment on Azgaar's maps (e.g. port city vs inland, rivers, etc.).

This is why I love software. Woo reusable abstraction.

Where is this "folded map" icon? I don't see it anywhere.

nvm. I found it. in fantasy map generator click on a burg name, & the folded map icon is the third icon in the row at the bottom. You can click "overworld" in the bottom-right corner of Watabou's map to open the corresponding Azgaar map. I don't remember seeing that before.

I really like the maps this generates. For me, plausibility is really important when creating any fictional map, because it's possible to create a map that looks beautiful but depicts a place that doesn't really make sense even with fantasy elements incorporated.

The color scheme of the political map is highly distinctive but feels cohesive. There's a decent phonetic/orthographic consistency in the naming within a state. The religions layer doesn't feel particularly integrated with the political one, for instance I found a theocracy without an organized religion.

The geography is also pretty good. Rivers are one of the telltale signs of poor fantasy map building, but this makes pretty believable rivers, though I did find a case of an inland sea draining into itself. It's good the mountains form ranges, but it would be interesting to have some more evidence of volcanism. I found one map with a huge area filled with mountains in an unrealistic way but I had a fun time imagining how it may have gotten that way in a fantasy world.

I really like that it has some climate generation and I'd love to see more, things like prevailing winds, winter/summer variation, and more of a Köppen climate classification[0] than the biomes currently listed, but I know this is a fantasy map generator and those require parameterizing more the nature of the planet being mapped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köppen_climate_classification

> an inland river draining into itself

Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_River

Can you explain further? I don’t see anything particular unusual about its flow from the Wikipedia article.

You've misquoted me. I was talking about a large body of water that had a river leaving it, looping around and draining back into it. That's a very peculiar behavior for a river.

The Jordan river flows through the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea before proceeding on south. Nothing strange there. The situation I'm talking about would be like if a river left the Dead Sea from the south, looped around and immediately flowed back into the Dead Sea from the north.

Thank you for the explanation, but I did not misquote you, I misunderstood you. I didn’t see the same random map you saw, so I asked a question and quoted you verbatim.

Didn’t mean for it to come off as hostile— I meant that your misunderstanding may have come from misreading what I had written, as I don’t think I wrote about an “inland river.” But even as I wrote it, it’s not particularity clear unless you are already familiar with that kind of map making mistake, so happy to explain. Either way, hope this clears up any confusion!

Do you have an opinion on the Dwarf Fortress world generator? If I am not mistaken it simulates some limited volcanic and geoogical activity.

Love it— the geological aspect of it is simulated beyond my armchair level of expertise, so I'm generally quite happy with the results.

The political side of the world is pretty well done with simulation in detail, but I'd love to see more nuanced politics, stuff like meaningful civil wars where factions split and inter-fight.

I would love to see more climate modeling in DF as well. Biomes are a great start for climate, but I would really like to see things like the amount of rainfall you get affecting what crops you can grow.

This blog is amazing as well:

https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/

The latest entry is about the mentioned map generator by the way. Make sure to check earlier ones!

That amazing blog is one of the inspirations for Azgaar's map generator: https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first-post/

Can anyone help me understand our facination with fantasy maps ? Why do I feel inspired or awesome when looking at them ?

Is it because of the anticipated dopamine hit from the expected discovery of the complexity of the terrains, stories, cultures, races etc ? Is it because of the endless possibilities that an open map presents ?

Is it why I was crazy about skyrim, Baldur's, Fallout & open worlds back in the days ?

I think it is that feeing of discovering the unknown.

Somewhat related I’ve been reading the original Mt. Everest reconnaissance journals, and it’s just so fascinating reading someone describing their awe, joy, and disappointments as they try to find a path to Everest, not even a summit route.

I never thought I would get so engrossed in reading this kind of thing.

https://archive.org/stream/mounteverestreco00howa#page/n10/m...

I believe it. Arc'teryx had a photo essay a few years ago about a journey up a previously unnamed peak https://blog.arcteryx.com/greenland-photo-essay/

Oh, I get chills reading it again. It's slightly different with a nice good fantasy world though so there's a little bit more there than the feeling of that discovery.

I like this one more: https://ui2.worldspinner.com/

The process can seem a bit lengthy but you can skip most parts (e.g.: culture generation) and just get to the map bit.

Here is a map I made last night: https://i.imgur.com/HYMrbjx.png

I turned off all cities, roads, rivers, etc, as I just wanted a plain map.

In addition to the awesomeness of this tool, it links to several other tools as part of its flow.

One of those is my heraldry generator, visible directly here: https://ironarachne.com/heraldry

BTW, silly question -- do you by any chance have the opposite of this tool? I.e. something that would parse a blazon and produce an image? Thank you!

I'm afraid not. That is a MUCH harder problem, since parsing blazon of any complexity has more than a little nuance to it.

Ohhh this is amazing, thank you!

Are there any modern/future/sci-fi map generators out there? All the ones I've seen have been fantasy-focused. Something that generates modern sounding names, vehicle roads, airports/seaports/spaceports, that kind of thing?

This is excellent! I'll be using this for my OSR sandbox campaign for sure!

Note that if you want to use this for a hexcrawl, the hexes it generates are 50mi on their short diagonal - this means they fit five (four and two halves) 6 mile hexes on their short diagonal, if we go by https://www.welshpiper.com/hex-templates/

Pops up this error on Safari 12.1.2:

elevateLakes@main.js?version=1.0:1103:10 generate@main.js?version=1.0:593:17 generateMapOnLoad@main.js?version=1.0:198:11 checkLoadParameters@main.js?version=1.0:170:20 global code@main.js?version=1.0:171:2

Console says: TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'religCells.sort((a,b) => b.pop - a.pop)[0]')

I love it! Has anyone built something on top of one these maps?

I've seen maybe a dozen similar map generators, however this is probably the most customize-able one I've seen; an impressive toolset. Even more impressive that the entire tool seems to be built without any templating or view framework. jQuery is used to some extent but for the most part the entire app is built with plain old vanilla DOM manipulation.

The codebase could use a few comments and cleaner structure, but overall it's quite easy to poke through.

Slightly related - I needed a generator for maps of encounters in the wilderness for my d&d campaign, and the ones I found weren't working well for me, so I made my own - very unpolished version, but maybe someone will find it useful:

https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/

Oddly hitting F5 doesn't regenerate the map on ff/windows for me. Have to do a full reload with ctrl+shift+r.

You can also regenerate without reloading the page by pressing F2 (there is also a button in toolbox).

On the latest Nightly release, and it does generate new map on my end.

Very inspirational. Actually I think I'll send it to a fantasy author friend of mine!

Very impressive. What does it use?

Code-wise, it's mostly using d3.js to generate SVG. You can browse it at https://github.com/Azgaar/Fantasy-Map-Generator .

Algorithm-wise, it's built on Delaunay+Voronoi: https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/voronoi-graph/

The project started after Azgaar was inspired by Mewo2's map article and Scott Turner's amazing map blog: https://azgaar.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/first-post/

Thanks for a detailed response.

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