The Dark Forest

It will be very hard to do this, so I’m looking into ways to make it more efficient to generate realistic terrain

https://github.com/dandrino/terrain-erosion-3-ways

wow what a coincidence I made the initial upscaled map (and even saved it, what a breakthrough!) last night

yassss erosion program

well to me it sure seems we would need a 2km coastline for this erosion program to work anyway

0 km coastline

how's my 2km

It's really hard to create proper mountain slopes in contour mode. It's easier to do this in grayscale but, it's still hard because the colors look so similar to one another that you end up with a lot of mistakes (like bump valleys where you intended a flat one). But maybe I just need to get good at grayscale...?

I kept thinking of a hypothetical program to make elevation drawing easier but like, I found that I was basically describing the cities skylines terrain editor.

* Lets you draw smooth slopes between any two points

* Lets you easily manipulate the terrain up and down

* Lets you use some basic stamps to add some randomness

* Lets you rotate the canvas in 3d to "see" the mountains you are drawing (if at an exaggerated scale)

But it's not quite the cities skylines editor. I think, for me at least, it's a huge advantage that I have like 7 years of experience of staring at Pavala-type contours, so I intuitively know what the colors mean and stuff. And it helps keep elevation manageable by limiting ourselves to 23 colored contours instead of fussing about 255 grayscale contours or even worse, 9000 1-meter contours.

So in conclusion I still think it makes sense to do an image editor that has the capability to do more advanced map-drawing-specific-things like slopes, easily moving terrain up and down, and maybe stamps.