Tools and Operations

Fun Operations

Topographical

Some fun brainstorming-style ideas about what tools we might like for topographical editing:

• draw vague outline, raise a continent out of the oceans.
• in a specified area, raise all the land a fixed amount (to make highlands and general editing)
• raise or lower random mountainous peaks in an area.
• draw and generate chasms in the earth.
• erode a region, dulling all the sharp edges.
• drop a meteor, or several, at a point, and watch the ensuing chaos.
• flatten an area into a plane (or a magically blasted region)
• undo

There are some issues with these tools that need to be thought about.

How do you select/paint the area to be affected?

At what resolution are you editing the data?

Cartographical

There are a number of sorts of data that we want to edit that we consider 'cartographic' data.

• cities
• roads
• rivers
• boundaries (forests, swamps, jungles, etc)
• political boundaries
• natural resources

...amongst others.

Some tools we might want include:

• freehand (with smoothing) roads and rivers
• freehand place cities, natural resources, etc.
• randomly place items (with random names & data)
• paint on regions of political influence, etc.
• draw borders on the land, and have it be smart enough to follow the coastline for the rest....