Early SFIA musings , peeps and NMWM

I’m watching tomorrows’ episode of SFIA on Nebula, ‘Mars First vs. Moon First’. I’m firmly in the Moon camp (and God damn Jeff Bezos! 8-), but I'm also in the ‘Phobos First’ and ‘Let’s set up a floating research station in the upper atmosphere of Venus’ camps, as well as ‘Let’s mine the Main Belt and Trojan asteroids plus Jovians with robots’. Moon First, then asteroids and Phobos before we land on Mars, which is likely anyway, despite what Elon thinks.

Anyway, peeps and a new, ‘new model world map’, dongma? The current peep model instantiates based on facing and that lets me orient a box or cube one edge down. The forward and rear faces are diamonds well suited to a neck and head and the tail bit, then the upper and lower pairs of faces can be quickly and simply similarly subdivided and the center point pulled out for feet and wing-tips.

For the NMWM, I want to let the user pick points in the map for interactivity, and px and py correspond to longitude and latitude in 3D. Each pixel is then an area on the surface of my world, a spherical polyhedron based on a UV sphere. The center of each quad is then closest to a given feature point picked by the user and belongs to that voronoi cell. Every other or every third VC might belong to land or sea, and I will want to calculate each pixels’ area when determining total areas. Otherwise, the page selects random feature points and random land and sea; we can apportion land and sea by looking for some fraction of land or sea, then some other fraction of land or sea, until we have a random map. We might have 37% land and look for the first 23% of that in the largest VC and its neighbors, then some further fraction of the remaining 77%, and then again and again until we’re done. Or we can look for the seas first, especially if there’s more land than sea. I can see ways of clumping VC cells properly to make continents, and then looking to border pixels to draw mountain arcs, or archipelagos in the seas.