This is a great idea. I'm wondering if it might be helpful to post the link the the fcw of the city, if one exists?

I would like to claim 11, with 16 as a backup if someone steals it.

Thanks for your work, Remy. I really love the way the site looks now. I've been meaning to come back and be more present in the forums, and this is definitely a good time to do it!

HI Barliman,

I've included a png with my settings here. It didn't come out exactly like this. I kept changing the north pole until I got an arrangement which fit most of the map in a centered set up rather than being cut up by the edges. I didn't actually find the best set up right away, but I had done a lot of work so I accepted it. Every time I open up FT, it loads these settings and gives me a new map, and most of them are pretty fantastic and amenable to good centering. I've saved about thirty different worlds and even done full climate workups for one of them. I'd be happy to throw you a few files if you like.

For curiosity's sake, I'll just mention that this is 0 N 130 E, while the best fit is actually 30 N 118 E, if I recall correctly. I actually did a lot of experimenting with pole positioning, as I was exploring the idea it could be used to simulate continental drift. It was fun, and I came up with some cool alternate maps, but ended up returning to this one.

As a caution, if you do fool with the poles, settle on the final position before doing time-consuming incisions, as they often become undone. Also, do your best to keep land off the 180 as this will give you profound incisions you don't want. I do know how to fix them though, if you have trouble.

I could go on all day about FT, I really do love that program and learned how to do some fun stuff in it.

A.

Hey Sue,

I've already spent a lot of time with Geoff's cookbook, and then a few interesting tutorials that were built off it at Cartographer's Guild. I actually came up with about eight different techniques to model the climate of the world, and then decided to just rebuild the rainfall and temperature maps according to some basic earth principles, with reference to some maps I found online. So I set up a basic bar approach for the temperature, with four different temperatures, and then created intermediate areas that were dependent on ocean currents, so that where ocean currents went the temperature would be modified. I then smoothed the final result at several different values, comparing each one to the real world map. The temperature map I posted was smoothed at a value of 150, and I feel is fairly close to the earth's (but I'm open to hear countering opinions).

I am about half way through a rainfall map using similar techniques, although of course its a whole lot more complicated.

The reason I want to do worldwide climate is I want to simulate migration on the planet to determine where cultures are.

Any thoughts?

And thanks for hunting that down for me, even if I had already seen it.

A.

So I see this comment come up a lot. I have done a ridiculous amount of experimentation with FT3, mostly trying to come up with different methods of getting legitimate deserts onto my world. I've learned all sorts of things about axial tilt, as well as all the stuff that affects climate.

Before I continue on with a more general comment, I want to put up here one thing I came up with which I found intriguing. In doing the Israh tutorial, I noticed that the author often uses quite ridiculous numbers to achieve their effects, so I thought, why not try that with precipitation. Taking the earth data map provided with FT3, I focused on trying to get Africa to look like it does on the real world (because my world has a similar land mass). I settled on putting the precipitation amount at 0, and the random figure at 1000. This produced a reasonably similar Africa, but dried the Amazon rainforest out. What are you going to do?

Anyway, the point is, using 0 precipitation and 1000 random will get you small deserts, ranging from decent deserts to mere strips of aridity. If you then play around with the setting, you'll be able to get those deserts to shrink or grow. One thing that's great about using this setting is you're also more likely to get evergreen rainforest, which is also generally lacking in the climate model. It does reduce temperate grassland quite a bit, unfortunately. One thing I did like about it is it put a desert in a place that really surprised me, actually along the equator. When I looked at it more closely, I realized that it was actually a reasonable place for a desert, since there was a lot of mountains in the region that would cast rainshadow. I liked that because the deserts weren't just in all the obvious places, just as they aren't on earth (Somalia/Ethiopia, for instance).

The other difficulty with producing deserts is of course temperature, and I came up with an interesting idea based on axial tilt. From my research, I determined that January is 7% hotter than July, so I altered the sun setting in temperature to 1.035 and 0.965 to create a temperature map for both months. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it had a profound effect on the world's temperatures (5 C at the equator). I then varied the random category for precipitation to 750 in January and 1280 (I think) in July, reasoning that there would be more rain during the cold time of the year. It then occurred to me that for January you should really use the July map in the northern hemisphere and the January map in the southern.

Then I had kind of a brilliant idea: why not create a dry map for the deserts of your world? You could maybe have 40 precipitation with the usual variation. Wherever this resulted in desert, you could use the values generated on the dry map and transfer them to a master map. You could do the same with the ITCZ , ocean currents, whatever.

One final thing: maybe its just for my map, but I've actually found that the FT3 climate model is fairly accurate if you just look at which areas it predicts will be dry or wet, cold or warm. The trouble is that the range of values in both cases is too narrow. For instance, my world's temperature ranges from about -10 at the poles to around 29 on land at the equator. It should really be something more like - 58 to 34 (for regions where there is human habitation).