Overview

World Builder is a shareware program to draw maps of worlds. It uses continental drift and true meteorological computations to provide realistic maps including mountain ranges, rain shadows and rivers.

You can use World Builder to invent worlds for roleplaying games or as background for fiction, or you can use it to learn about earth science processes.

The current version of World Builder is 1.3, released on June 12, 1998. It is available on Windows-95, Windows-NT, Linux Intel and Sun Solaris platforms.

Copyright 1998 by David L. Allen



Related Links

Terrain synthesis tools

GrimmWare Home of the Genesis Engine, a continental drift simulator. And they called me "just a weekend hacker"!

Irony Games Contains several web-based instant map makers. When I last visited (5/30/98) their world maker was no longer available.

Logicrucible Home of several RPG generators, including a star map generator, planet generator and a name generator. They advertise a city generator, but they once advertised it as "available in late 1996".

Fractal Worldmap Generator A web-based map generator, with options to control the projection.

Terranova: Planet of the day A web-based fractal planet generator, with very nice graphics.

Educational programs

World Building Dr. Elizabeth Viau teaches a course on world building at California State University, Los Angeles. This page has a lot of technical links and also links to worlds created by university and college students.

Star system generators

Accrete A collection of implementations of Matt Burdick's "starform" program to generate star systems from real astrophysical formulae.

Alien Planet Designer Concentrates more on a planet than a system, and has a lot of good scientific links.

Link pages

Captain Barcode's War Room If you're interested in terrain synthesis, I suggest starting with this page, because the author has done a good job of categorizing the different approaches to the problem. The index for this directory contains many other useful links to technical information on behavior and game programming.

Maps One of the most comprehensive sets of links on making maps, both art tools to help you draw them, and tools to generate them.

Contents of directory programs/mapping The software storage area for the above link page.

World Building An excellent compilation of links on world building, primarily from the perspective of designing a fantasy world for gaming or fiction, rather than terrain synthesis.

Xenology webring site A small but growing web ring designed to present theoretical worlds, species and cultures as they might develop in environments different from ours. Previous Random Home List Next

RPG.NET Support Directory Contains a bunch of gaming-related programs, including a few terrain synthesis links.

NetRPG - Programs Contains a bunch of gaming-related programs, including a few terrain synthesis links.

3-D Starmaps Contains a lot of information on how to make and use three-dimensional starmaps, and some of the links relate to terrain synthesis as well.

Gaming Software Page Contains several gaming-related programs, including a couple of terrain synthesis links.

Dungeon Crawl Developer Site Contains a lot of gaming related links, but only one or two related to map building.

Spatial Modelling Environment Contains some simulation and landscape mapping links. There are some related links here.

Technical information

Introduction to Plate Tectonics As you would guess, this is a tutorial on how plate tectonics works.

Webquest: Plate Tectonics Another introduction to plate tectonics.

The Astrobiology Web An online guide to the living universe. This is on the border between a link page and a technical information page, but it contains many useful informational links.

The Nine Planets An excellent introduction to the only real planets we know about, and a number of astronomical links.

Some Requirements for Extra-terrestrial Life A set of notes which defines life zones and shows what kind of star systems would be likely to support life.

Feature Based Fractal Terrain Generation A thesis which combines L-systems and fractals to generate terrain features, such as mountain ranges, instead of just random terrain.

Building Fractal Planets An article by Dr. Ken Musgrave on the requirements for building a fractal world.



Credits



Version history

Pre-release

I developed the continental drift algorithm in 1990 and released it in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sources.misc. I added the basic climate generation in 1991 and released a new version. Neither of these had much in the way of GUI.

I gradually added the interpolation and rendering algorithms, and developed but never released a native Windows 3.1 version. Finally I decided to put it all together with a modern GUI and release it.

Version 1.2, May 30, 1998

Announced on several newsgroups, sent e-mail to many owners of link pages who might be interested, submitted to search engines and Yahoo.

Version 1.3, June 12, 1998

Major features:

Minor changes:



World Builder home page Last updated: June 12, 1998 Feedback? email dallen@senteinc.com