Woah, I never expecdted this to result in such a discussion. :/
Now I feel the need for some clarifications.
I never said this was planned to replace manual work, as this is simply not possible for me to create such a quality by simple heightmap generaton. Nor do I want that. I'm well aware that hand crafted landscapes can't be beaten by this generator and it's not its purpose.
It's not even geared towards creating WoW-like maps. It's like Milly said for more "realistic" terrain. So no mountains to separate zones, no steep WoW like hills etc.
Texturing is pretty basic too, it's simply height based. No fancy patters or anything. Sorry if you expected this to create blizzlike zone maps.
This is more like creating an empty canvas for adding content.
If you played The Elder Scrolls Oblivion you might be aware of the same thing. They generated the terrain and fixed things they didn't like by had (more or less ^^)
I love building maps, but I hate trying to do textures.
^ this!
Me too... but the texturing is kinda simple and doesn't look really good. Maybe I can find a way for patterns or stuff like that, but not at the moment sadly.
Automatically generated content can't replace hours of manual work.
is tool is capble of generating at least basic terrain shape out of alphamap data, it is useless. The only possible use of it now is creating those kind of maps people are messing with on ac-web and some other similar wow modding resources. No automation can replace manual work you ar
I never planned to. Please see this as a canvas and not a finished map.
And it already is useful for me.
(..)But wouldn't it be better to use a world map generator program to create the shape, and then carefully apply a more accurate height map via Photoshop? Or better yet, use the worldmap shape as a basis for applying alphamaps and then do the shaping by hand.
I did that first, because I thought the same thing. It worked and was kinda ... boring. I wanted to be surprised too.
The world I work on doesn't really need a predefined map. I have some concept ideas and almost no lore. More like ideas for scripts etc. And I want a big sandbox to fly over, see some lake and think "that might be a good place for xy". Might not be the best way to work at this, but I got no schedule anyway.
Australia
When I heard about automaticaly generated WoW map, I have also heard that "Minecraft can do it too". Well, I hope that whoever plans to tryto do this understands that this is not Minecraft and that generating landscape for WoW will be really far, far more difficult. Just btw, we, who have played Minecraft, all know how glitchy that generator sometimes gets. Fixing such bugs could be really troublesome, especially for someone, who uses such generator because he simply can't model and texture terrain.
I definitely undestand that someone wants to have 10x10 ADT map and just doesn't have time to do all spawning and shaping. I get it. But if someone wants such generator only because he is not bad artist, but only lazy to learn how to shape terrain to make it look better than piece of crap - thats something I will never support. And just btw, I am terrible artist myself, but my terrain looks at least OK enough. Because I wasn't fucking lazy and learned how to do it, in a simple and enough good-looking way.
Is there anyone who will disagree with statement, that auto-tune using is killing artistic aspects of music - and what music should be about? Well, you should also agree with fact that no generator should be ever used instead of painting by hand. Generator is robot. Robots don't have emotions. Art is about "explaining" emotions. Robots can't be artists. Thats my opinion on this matter.
You probably disagree, but I don't see myself as an artist here. I have a project I work on for myself. What I want is content. I'm a single person and well aware I have no time to create a map that size on my own. So generating content randomly allows me to do this. Sure it doesn't look as amazing as the hand crafted works here. But it gives me the chance to realize what I want, when the alternative would be giving up. I can always tweak areas until I feel like they are decent enough for my purpose. And this is not about laziness, but being realistic in my case. Plus, you can do fun things with auto tune too.
Just a matter of taste. ^^
And as a final note, it's not like I did this to force everybody to generate terrain, sorry if some people were offended by this.I love the creations on here and I love browsing the Showoff area to look at those amazing screenshots. It's just for creating a basis to work on, nothing more nothing less.
Uhm... sorry for the wall of text btw. X-x
Show Posts
