Here’s the first island continent built by the new MMO geometry generation code.  This is a medium-sized continent (which, honestly, I expect is approximately the size that most people would actually want to use in a free-play game of MMORPG Tycoon 2.  It has a bit more ground space than one of the main continents in WoW.

I’m pleased to have the water shaping algorithms working for the new “freeform regions” system.  In the original MMORPG Tycoon, regions were all slightly distored squares;  each one had exactly four neighbors, and they were indexed like the squares on a grid.  In v2, I’m now using irregular regions;  I’ve seen regions with seven or eight borders, and it’s all working properly now.

I also wrote code to get rid of the mountain boundaries where ground meets the ocean.  There’s still a lot of work to be done, though;  the continent is still basically flat (at least, at this scale);  I need to decide how I want to deal with that, whether to use a system based on perlin noise, or whether I want to do something smarter.  I also want to set a “base terrain type” and lighting data separately for different regions, so this will start to look a bit more patchwork, as happens in MMORPG minimaps.

Finally, as part of that, I really need to generate beaches around the coastlines.

And there’s a bug which is generating small pillars near the corners of sea regions.  So you get these weird little spikes of rock out in the middle of the sea for no apparent reason — usually these are about 5-10 meters wide.

But I’ve put all this together while on sleeping pills, so I call it a big success.  Will fix the bugs in the morning, once the sleeping pills have worn off.  :)