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[AndyKorth]

Beautiful work, azagthoth! That biome map (http://www.dungeonleague.com/wp-content/gallery/biome/1272339879623.gif) is amazing. It's the first picture I opened when I came back to this thread, and I noticed the rain shadows in the shape of the biomes immediately.

The horizontal banding from the temperature map is a really nice touch. I think it helps a lot to make the map look realistic.

I noticed you do modify the temperature map based on the height of the terrain. Have you thought about doing any sort of other modifications? For example, oceans causing temperature changes (which seems to be a pretty huge factor in Earth's biome map.

[Trevor Dunbar]

I wanted to work on my own dungeon generation algos at some point

[azagthoth]

I noticed you do modify the temperature map based on the height of the terrain.

Actually the post on my blog isn't quite accurate for temperature as far as what goes into the biome function currently.  The biome image you linked does not use a temperature map that takes into account elevation it is straight bands based on latitude with some noise.  I simplified it because some of the results from the elevation based temperature were undesirable.  For example if you have a cell that is mountain and rain forest and you take into account elevation it might result in taiga or tundra which might be ok as you go up the mountain but does not make sense at the base.  My solution to this was to instead create separate biome definitions for each elevation level so mountain rain forest is different from plain rain forest.  These distinctions are visible on the tiled map but not the biome bitmap.

Have you thought about doing any sort of other modifications? For example, oceans causing temperature changes (which seems to be a pretty huge factor in Earth's biome map.

Currently the oceans directly effect humidity which in turn have a large effect on the biome map.  I am not sure what effect the oceans would have on the temperature map do you have any links that describes how this might work ? (I base a lot of what I try to simulate off of whatever I can find on wikipedia). 

[AndyKorth]

After thinking about it a bit more and chatting about it with a friend, we came to the realization that ocean proximity doesn't really affect the average temperature of a region (averaged over the whole year), but it does affect the temperature extremes of a region.

Here's an animated gif of temperature at each month: http://planetariumweb.madison.k12.wi.us/files/planetarium/earth-global-temp.gif Inland Asia and North America get very cold and quite warm. With the exception of mountainous regions, annual average temperature is more aligned with latitude and height, like you have done: http://www.climate-charts.com/images/world-temperature-map.png

So maybe it's not as useful as I thought it might have in a world generator... aside from the fact that coastal reasons just tend to be more temperate, even if that effect only lasts a few dozen miles... I don't have any good sources on that though.

[azagthoth]

Haven't posted in a while.  I think I am doing something that is pretty unproductive in terms of actually working towards completed software but it keeps me interested which in the end is all that really matters. 

I have been going back and forth on various grid systems to represent the world with.  Originally I settled on a plane subdivided into square cells because it was easiest.  I did some experiments with hexagons on a plane but at the time I was more interested in other problems.  Last week I came across some links that caught my attention to represent the world on a sphere using hexagons.

So far I have the code to create the base world geometry at different resolutions. 
Here is an example of a sphere with ~22000 hexes: http://www.dungeonleague.com/wp-content/gallery/subdivision/wg21872.jpg
Currently I am targeting around 1000000 hexes which will be similar in resolution to the worlds I have been generating on a square grid plane.  The next thing I am doing is working on a camera system to easily navigate the sphere.  After that I will start modifying the algorithms I have already written to work on the sphere.