I have an ambitious plan to create a “fantasy history simulator”. If I complete it, it will generate a random world, generate realistic climate for it and - based on that - generate realistic vegetation and animals. Then, it will place primitive tribes in a number of places who then will be able to evolve as a civilization based on the environment. (Cue: there were no horses or oxen in the Americas which changed the available transport options and hence the shape of the civilization. Or: China doesn’t have much silver or gold which resulted in a very unstable currency system.) I will cap the available technologies on an ancient/medieval level, as I am not really interested in modern history.
I am as of now unsure if the user should be able to direct the course of history or just be presented with the output of the simulation.
For now, I have created a semi-realistic temperature system which takes into account the axial tilt and irradiation at various latitudes, the heat absorption rates of earth vs sea and a simple equilibrium system where the air temperature slowly equalizes between neighboring tiles.
I am attaching the .love for you to play with. Instructions: press “R” to recreate the landmass, press “T” to see the air temperature, press “G” to see the ground temperature. Press “UP” to progress by one month or “RIGHT” to progress by one day. I suggest that you press “T” and then keep pressing “UP” to see how the temperature shapes over the course of the year.
As I now have a working Voronoi implementation, I will be rewriting the thing anyway due to efficiency problems (a grid-based map needs a lot of tiles to look realistic, and processing all those tiles is time-consuming. It is allright for now, but once I would add the other systems, I think it would slow down to a crawl.)