FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Use an image as a heightmap, use another image as a biome map, edit map settings and even biomes in-game, overlay river and road layers, do raster analysis. Effectively this is a WorldPainter mod. You can use spatial files for elevation and landcover or you can paint your own using any paint program. You can also persist structures using in-game tools.

use a grayscale image as a heightmap:


use in-game settings tool (r,g,b color band overlay shown in background)



configure biome interpretation in-game:


results:


perform on-the-fly raster analysis such as slope and aspect:


overlay an image onto the map (here a grayscale version of the same image is used as the heightmap) in 216 colors:


dependencies: requires mod security disabled, for more specific and advanced features an image library will be required, see below...

download latest zip: https://github.com/bobombolo/realterrain/archive/master.zip
github: https://github.com/bobombolo/realterrain
youtube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pehrH6Bh0

license: original content is WTFPL

includes several lua libraries including: magick, imagesize, imlib2, graphicsmagick, lua-socket, lunatic-python (not all are used). ImageMagick is the most tested library for this mod, and until recently was a requirement. GraphicksMagick is recommended for speed and automatic bit-depth detection and handling of strange GIS rasters.

thanks to paramat for the skeletal mapgen mod code: https://gist.github.com/paramat/389ee65ce9378d9dad25

Oh my that is crazy.
Very nicely done to.
Might be interesting to see on an server.

Whoa, that's a great mod!
It would be interesting to generate ores and trees automatically to make it look even better.

I looked at the source code and just want to point out, the chunk/mapblock size is not fixed to 80x80x80 nodes, use "local sidelen" instead.

Krock, I wrote the basic code assuming a large image or heightmap would be pre-prepared by splitting into 80x80 arrays, although that's not how it currently works.

Awesome 0_o !

looks great :D

How can I get this kind of tiff images for a given region ?
I would like to have a Minetest world that represents the Vosges region (in France, between Nancy and Mulhouse).

this will tottaly be in ultimatetest (viewtopic.php?f=50&t=11901) when it is done

Gael de Sailly wrote:How can I get this kind of tiff images for a given region ?
I would like to have a Minetest world that represents the Vosges region (in France, between Nancy and Mulhouse).

look for a Digital Elevation Model of your region in GeoTIFF format, then just take it into photoshop and reduce the color mode to 8 bit, save as TIFF with no compression.

here is a low resolution dem of most of europe, however it has been colorised and the pallete would need to be restored to a grey scale http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/digital-elevation-model-of-europe

anyway most countries have websites for obtaining this data, here is a site that might help, i can't get the map interface to work but maybe it will for you: https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dem/squareCellGrid/map?theme=DDP

finally try this software (there is a tutorial) http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem/microdem.htm

I've found how to proceed, with free softwares (I have not Photoshop) :

1. Download the maps from SRTM Data Search
2. Open the map with ImageMagick
3. Go to "Enhance ~> Brightness" and set it to 200. You will need to do it several times (at least 3 times) until the map is light enough (or else it will be too flat).
4. Save the image
5. Open it with GIMP. It will convert it into 8-bits image. You can "stick" several images and select the desired zone.
6. The map is distorted by the projection. You can correct this problem by changing the length of the image. Resize the length to old_length × cos average_latitude (take your calculator). Not needed if you're close to the equator or if you don't expect a good precision.
7. Save it into .tif image without compression, even lossless !

So after this adventure I've finally got my map of the Vosges. But I haven't found how to use it :/

Gael de Sailly would you please post both images (before and after) so we can get a idea what we need to achieve if we were to make one of our own?

I've tried to upload it, but they're too large (36 MB).

Gael de Sailly wrote:I've tried to upload it, but they're too large (36 MB).

Wow! Okay! Disregard that request.
Thanks anyway :)

imageloader mod now has a pure lua png library that I am working on integrating, this should allow for 16 bit images... as well as png and bmp support also lifted from imageloader.

bobomb wrote:imageloader mod now has a pure lua png library that I am working on integrating, this should allow for 16 bit images... as well as png and bmp support also lifted from imageloader.

very nice!

please let us know when you have 16bit support, so I can gen maps higher than 256 :)

https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/GdalOgrInLua

using gdal we can stop worrying about image formats and use proper GIS raster formats complete with spatial metadata such as projection, real world extent, pixel scale, elevation scale, etc.

Trying to get this to work, really nice mod here, but I get an error.. (latest git minetest)

maybe your cover.tif is not present? there should be one in the dem folder, if you don't want to use cover replace that line with

return demtiff:read(1):byte() - 32, 0

this mod is under heavy development right now so there will be improvements to the "cover" system

this mod is now moving towards using external libraries to enable the use of any image file format including 16-bit color depths. that means that mod security has to be disabled for this mod in minetest.conf and you must have luarocks installed as well as the lua-imlib2 library.

next steps in development will include better land cover, and an in-mod menu system for tweaking scale settings and reloading the map (which will destructively reset the map.sqlite file). Now that the mod has access to external lua libraries, I will also begin experimenting with downloading DEM tiles and/or other data directly from the internet using luasocket.



16 bit tiff used

That is awesome. I can't imagine the maps this could make.

Looks good and is good is awesome than can make maps

working on strata as discussed in the original thread:

biome, water and road "painting"




this branch has switched to using luarocks magick library (from imlib2) for true 16-bit support

https://github.com/bobombolo/realterrain/tree/sixteen

How could I install luarocks imlib2 ?

install imlib2
install luarocks
then

Since the luarocks magick package is now fixed (there was a path issue) I am switching the master branch to the magick version, one library is as tricky as another...

luafilesystem is also a dependency now (for now)

"trees" branch

trees merged into master branch:

Looking great! looks like Minetest will become the new Google Earth :D