by in
Fantasy maps, generally, are an act of creativity, but sometimes that creativity needs help. For me, I need more than just a little help. I need a tool to help outline the general shape of the world. For project PolyCycles, I turned to an online map generator.
The Hex map generator I wrote about in the Hex Map Generator post does have an amazing map generator, but I’m looking for a tool that defines continents and territories. I want a world to be generated. Certainly, the logic of the hex map generator could be expanded upon to produce something closer to what I want, but that’s extra work that might not payoff.
Azgaar’s Fantasy Map
There are some amazing map-making tools online, but I settled on Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator to help me come up with an outline of my world. Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator is open source and is supported by Patreon donations.
The generator has a ton of options to customize maps: canvas size, cultures, states, towns religions, world settings to adjust equator, poles, tropical zone… Ah, there’s a ton, which produces some very interesting maps. For me, the coolest features are related to displaying territories, roads and cities/towns.
With the above settings the following map is produced.
polycycle map
The Azgaar map is added to a material in Unity and the material is added to a plane. I generate a very large hex map by modifying the hex map code. Both maps are aligned. The hex map is saved and the work of conforming the hex map to the Azgaar map begins.
The world is intended to be large and currently I’m working on the right side of the Azgaar map with a hex map terrain large enough to cover the right continent. For comparison, you can see the peninsula with recognizable hexagonal tiles.
There are 74,800 cells in the current hex map from the above middle image. More than likely, the continents will need to be in separate Unity scenes. This should help performance for the final game, although, batching and GPU instancing should help boost performance, too.
In the next post, I’ll share more of the workflow and assets I’ll be using in the project.
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
Update – 4/2/2023
I’ve completed the first draft of the eastern portion of the map.
By no means is the eastern part of the map complete, however, this gives a good idea of the direction the map is developing. The next phase is to work on towns, cities, and points of interest. As those areas are developed, I’ll fine tune the terrain as needed to better reflect population centers. Overall, I like the general shape of the terrain.
update 4/9/2023
I love the hex terrain, but I wanted to model a portion of the world using Unity’s terrain using the hex terrain as a framework. The resulting terrain is softer than the hex terrain due to smoothing. During the modeling/creation process, I have much more control over textures and I like how I can highlight/darken areas that are uniform or flat with the hex terrain. Other problems I need to solve if I use the hex terrain as the permanent terrain system are eliminated if I use Unity’s terrain system.
The downside of this approach is that I’m developing the terrain twice. Once for the hex terrain to act as a framework for the actual terrain, and again mapping Unity’s terrain onto the hex terrain.
