Today’s prompt was ‘seahorse’ and with a little help from google I used a pretty good reference to achieve an excellent sketch, having a fairly good run this week! 8-P

Now I need to work out exactly what I want to code, dongma?!

I have been frittering away time on world-building projects with nothing to show for it and it’s time that I finish something.

The best place for me to start is 2D since I have a 2D medium, the computer screen, and I can use the hated bog-standard rectilinear map or a stereographic projection of a sphere, each heavily distorted in its own way. The map does need to fairly faithfully represent the surface of a world which is near enough to a perfect sphere so as to make no difference for my purposes.

For this I want to make some land and sea blobs modeled on real continents and oceans. Random heights aren't exactly what I want. I want to model the dice drop where TTRPG world builders draw outlines around dice and connect areas around dice which are ‘close enough’. Fake orogeny, mountain generation and rivers up from the sea instead of down. In the past I have drawn maps by hand with free-hand land or sea (or land and sea) blobs, then placed mountain ranges as lines running from one part of the land to another and then rivers from a river mouth on the coast, inland.

I need polygons, especially triangle meshes to draw weirdly shaped divs in my web page (I am still attached to the unholy trinity of HTML/CSS/Javascript which I can (horrors!) code in one HTML file and copy paste into my blog with mixed results. So, a triangle mesh of vertices at or below sea level, with a random point walk of points pulled above sea level. I can make a grid of points within my usual 520 pixels square, say 40 by 40 squares 13 pixels across or use percentages, 100% of a 520 px square div, and then randomize the points, following the edges to get the border of my map div. I can randomly ‘walk’ the points, pulling up land bits and defining the land triangles. The grid makes up quads, which would be subdivided across the short diagonal to make triangle pairs.

Okay, so go do that…