Thursday, April 14, 2016

Love that Dyson Logos map style

One Page Dungeon is done, I think.  I used the Dyson Logos map style, and the map looks pretty good, except for some parts I did in colored pencil instead of ink.  Ah well, it still looks way better than what I do when I make maps for my own use.  It's easy to make it look good with that method, so thanks, Mr Logos.

Waves are very hard things to model with a sense of realness.  What I've done so far isn't exactly as user friendly as I'd hoped, and the next step has only been worse.  As the natural endpoint of a wave's lifespan, breaking on a shoreline should be covered with some amount of realistic detail, but I've decided there is no way to make it game-able, even as pre-game preparation.  Not impossible, just not worth the effort.  I mean, there are three basic types of breakers hitting the shores of the world, and you could pretty much just figure out what the shore slope is in a given area and assign a type appropriately, but unless I'm misinterpreting the information I've found, to get a full picture, you need to also take into account wave period and height (which I already do) and do a multistep calculation to work out how high the wave gets as it approaches the shore, slows down when it starts hitting bottom, and the wave energy goes into piling up water higher than the original wave, eventually ending in a breaking wave of a certain height taking place in a certain depth of water.  The calculations aren't too hard, but one step does involve reading information off a pretty esoteric chart, which kind of complicates it.  Also, since I've pointed out how waves can decay in height while leaving their period pretty much the same, there are too many possible inputs to just turn it all into an easy-peasy table, no matter how much number crunching I'm willing to do.  So, for characters struggling in the surf, whether against sahuagin raiders or simply to reach shore, I'll probably figure out some generic, close-enough workaround and leave it at that.

But, God help me, I'll probably end up procrastinating with the equations for months before I finally step away once and for all.

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