Tool Teragon - Random Map Generator

[Riamus]

 

Teragon is a third party random map generator created by Pille that can make maps for A20 and A21.  It was first released for public use in January 2023 and has received many updates and new features since that time, with many more planned.  It comes with both a 2D and 3D preview of your generated maps and can even load maps generated through RWG or other sources to preview and add to or adjust.  Note that the 3D previewer needs to be downloaded separately.  Teragon has a built-in updater so you will always be up-to-date.

 

Teragon is a very powerful map generator, providing a significant number of parameters to create very unique and interesting maps.  Because of this, it requires time and effort to learn how to use it in order to get the most out of it.  However, you can easily use the default presets and just change the map seed to generate some really nice maps without needing to learn anything about using Teragon.  But for those who want a lot of control over making some very fun maps and are willing to learn all there is to know, Teragon offers more than you might expect.  To give you an idea of the complexity and available options Teragon offers, the documentation is currently over 300 pages, including screenshots and comparisons.  Much of that documentation is also included in Teragon in the form of help text, though screenshots are not currently available within Teragon, so the documentation is still available to see how different values in the parameters can affect your map.

 

It is highly recommended that you join the Teragon Discord server for assistance learning and using Teragon.  Help can be found in the #chat_and_help channel there and there are channels for tutorials, worlds and presets, among others.  You can also get help through the forum here but it will tend to be slower and less interactive than in Discord.

 

Online Documentation thread - Here you can see updates regarding the unofficial "online" documentation that I created.  This is a PDF that you can download and view.  You can also access this from the Help Center tab in Teragon.  This documentation will usually be updated within 24 hours of Teragon being updated, so be sure to download a new copy after each Teragon update so you have all the latest information.

 

Teragon Discord - Here you can get help with learning and using Teragon.  Visit #chat_and_help for any questions you might have.  This is also where you can download Teragon and Teragon's 3D Previewer.  There is also a POI Property List Generator available for download that you can use when using custom POI.

 

Teragon Maps thread - This is the original thread that was being used to discuss Teragon and can continue to be used for help and discussion.  It is also a good place to share maps or screenshots of maps you have created.  Note that the screenshots closer to the beginning of this thread are from much older versions of Teragon and may not look as good as what you will see in later screenshots.

 

==========================

 

Current version of Teragon:  v0.50

 

The features in Teragon are too numerous to list, but here are some of the bigger features available:

• Map sizes from 1k to 16k.  Note that 16k is currently not optimized well in Teragon and will take significantly longer than 15k, so it is recommended to use 15k instead unless you want your map generation to take a much longer time to complete.
• Erosion options to give you map a more realistic look.  Note that erosion takes a long time to generate and should be used only after you find map settings that you like.
• Diffuse biomes that allow biomes to change slowly from one to another instead of being a straight line between the biomes.  Note that due to how the game handles lighting in the different biomes, it may not look great while driving between biomes with diffusion turned on.
• Extensive control over mountains, hills and lakes, allowing you to change how rough the terrain is, how frequent these appear on the map, the general shape, and much more.
• Ability to choose if your map is surrounded by water or not.
• Control over how your towns are laid out, including districts and overall road layout, as well as town sizes.  You can even make a mega city map, where the map just one large city.
• Wilderness/Region POI settings allowing you to have anywhere from 0 to many thousands, depending on your map size.
• Unique to Teragon, there are regions that can be referenced to have specific wilderness POI only appear in certain regions.  So if you want a cabin POI to only appear in the mountains, you can do so.  If you want a fishing cabin to appear only on the coast, you can do this as well.  Ship POI can be placed only in water.
• Random and/or static spawn points.  Random spawn points can be given limitations, such as only in the Forest or only on roads.
• Terrain features:
  • Cliffed Coasts - Think of the Cliffs of Dover for a real world example.  These are cliffs along water sources.  They can also be set up to spawn on land.
  • Craters - You can spawn craters in specific locations or randomly around your map and adjust how they look.  If you want to fill in the crater with water or a specific biome like the Wasteland, you can do this as well.
  • Crevices - These are cracks in the earth that can be set to be shallow or go all the way to bedrock and can branch off into side crevices, depending on your settings.  With an adjustment of settings, these can be inverted into a form of mountain range that can be interesting to see.
  • Rivers - The rivers in Teragon are generated instead of being stamps.  This means that the rivers don't all look the same and can spread across the entire map.  Various settings allow you to have rivers that get wider the further they are from where they start and can adjust the riverbanks to be steep or smooth.  You can also adjust the number of branches in the rivers.
• Main roads will connect the gateway tiles between the towns and side roads will connect the wilderness POI to the main roads.  Note that roads take a lot of time to generate and if you have many wilderness POI, the side roads can take an extremely long time to complete.  It is recommended not to do roads until you like your map to save time.  It can also save you a lot of time by limiting the maximum number of side roads so that not all wilderness POI have roads connected to them so you don't need to generate roads to all of them.  This will save a lot of time if you have 1000+ wilderness POI on your map.
• A variety of biome map options available.  You can have a biome map that is similar to what you get from RWG.  You can also have biomes that are based on elevation.  This can allow you to have snow on mountains and desert on the shores, for example.  Another option allows you to have biomes based partly on elevation and partly on position on the map.  This can allow you to have snow in the north and desert in the south, for example.  There is also an option to have a radial layout of biomes.  This can let you have one biome in the center of the map and have biomes change as you move out from the center in any direction.
• Unique to Teragon, you can group POI together and then place them as if they were a single POI.  This is currently being used by some people to place the Airport Mod by AH64_Jimbo on maps without having to manually place every tile and POI by hand.
• Support for custom POI, including tiles, parts and prefabs.
• Support for overriding POI properties so you can change them to something you want without editing the XML and then losing those edits whenever the game is updated.  For example, as of A21, vanilla skyscrapers are set to not appear closer than 10km from another version of themselves.  This usually means you only get one of each on your map.  You can override this in Teragon to have them closer if you choose.

 

These are just some of the many features available to you in Teragon.  And, coming in the next release, initial stamp support will be available.  This will allow you to use stamps that you or others create and have those placed around your map.  For example, if you want sand dunes, you can use a sand dune stamp and overlap multiple of those on your map to create unique terrain that can't just be generated.  This could also work for things like mesas or other unique formations that Teragon can't generate on its own.  This is similar to the river stamps that you see on RWG maps but with far more control and options, allowing even the same stamp to not look exactly the same if placed in multiple places on your map.

 

Pille is always open to suggestions for features and has a long list of suggestions he's already considering.  Feel free to offer suggestions on Discord for him to consider.  There are many things that are already planned to be added that may take precedence, but if he likes your suggestion, it will likely be added at some point.

 

MOD AND PREFAB PACK AUTHORS:  If you are an author of a mod that includes POIs or a prefab pack, we would be happy to work with you to make your mod or prefab pack easily compatible with Teragon.  Users who are familiar with using Teragon can easily make maps using any custom POI from packs or mods without help, but we can help you to provide support for Teragon so that new users can use your prefab pack or mod with Teragon maps without difficulty.  The main part of this is to include a "POI Property List" that Teragon can use to load up your POIs when generating maps, though other things may also be useful, such as a "Town Property List" if you want people using your mod or prefab pack to have towns that have specific districts in them, including custom districts.  For more information, please contact me on Discord and I'll help you out.

 

DISCLAIMER:  Teragon is still in active development and there are some features and parameters that are not currently working or not fully implemented.  There are also many features that are planned to be added and not yet available.  Some features found in A21 RWG, like switchbacks on roads, are not yet available in Teragon.  Teragon will continue to grow and more features will be added with time.  You may also find bugs and there are certain things that will cause Teragon to crash.  These are things that are not uncommon when using an application that is in active development.  In most cases, if you talk to someone on Discord about a crash you are getting, they can tell you what is wrong in your preset pretty easily as we have seen most of these enough times to recognize them, so please check in with us if you're having any trouble and we'll help you get it sorted out.

Edited June 9 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of what Teragon can do.  I may add more to this later.

 

General Interface, showing the Basic tab.  This tab can look different depending on the preset and the "Did you know?" tip will change each time you start Teragon.

 

8k Map using the World Generator 1 default preset (with a couple things disabled):

All large cities are at the top of the map, so not the best seed for this, but it still gives you an idea of what it might look like.

 

The same map seen in the 3D Previewer:

 

8k Map using the World Generator 2 default preset (with a couple things disabled):

 

The same map seen in the 3D Previewer:

 

8k Map using the World Generator 3 default preset:

 

The same map seen in the 3D Previewer:

 

8k Mega City Map:

 

The same map seen in the 3D Previewer:

Edited April 15 by Riamus (see edit history)

[warmer]

Thank you for being this back thread back to life. 

[Riamus]

1 minute ago, warmer said:

Thank you for being this back thread back to life. 

There wasn't really a thread for this before.  The one you are thinking of was mostly just about the documentation.  But having this here is still a good idea.

[ZPhFK8OuHX]

Teragon sucks so hard, all it ever does is crash

[bdubyah]

22 minutes ago, ZPhFK8OuHX said:

Teragon sucks so hard, all it ever does is crash

I've used it several times without issue, as have tons of other people. But sure, I bet it's the program and not user error...

[Riamus]

6 hours ago, ZPhFK8OuHX said:

Teragon sucks so hard, all it ever does is crash

It works just fine if you don't have errors in your preset.  And if you do have problems, it's easy to get help to fix those problems and then you won't have the problems anymore.  But that does require actually asking for help instead of throwing insults.

[ZPhFK8OuHX]

I don't mind, but due to the lack of debug symbols there's very little I can actually do

 

I analyzed a process minidump in windbg  which revealed a NULL_POINTER_READ error

 

That's an error that is inherently related to a programmer screwing up memory management. Something that is just inherently a problem with c++

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, ZPhFK8OuHX said:

I don't mind, but due to the lack of debug symbols there's very little I can actually do

 

I analyzed a process minidump in windbg  which revealed a NULL_POINTER_READ error

 

That's an error that is inherently related to a programmer screwing up memory management. Something that is just inherently a problem with c++

Well, if you ever decide to actually get help and want to ask in a normal way, someone can help you.  Until then, you are free to use RWG.  All the others using Teragon without problems will continue to use it regardless.

 

For anyone else, although I agree that such posts can make you want to react in a similar way, please let's keep this thread from evolving into a mess.

Edited April 15 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Teragon 0.50 has been released.  There are over 50 additions, improvements and bug fixes in this release, making it (I believe) the biggest update to date.  Note that stamp support has been postponed as it is complex and is taking longer to implement than expected.

 

Some highlights for this release include:

• You can now use the current version to make A20 maps instead of using the old version of Teragon.  Note that this has not been fully tested yet and if you have any problems, please let us know in Discord.
• Nesting of tags is now possible, allowing you to have something like [random,int,10,[math,int,10+10]].  This can be used to simplify doing something like the random craters you can see in the World Generator 2 preset.  Note that both that preset and the new World Generator 4 preset do not currently use this nesting and so are not yet simplified.  That will likely come with the next release.
• A new IF block (start/end) that currently can only be used to enable/disable a block of commands but will later allow you to do things like only run specific commands if some condition is true or false, such as if you have a specific number of a given POI on the map.
• New World Generator 4 preset that is a mega city preset so you don't need to make your own if you want a mega city map.
• The ability to run a specific command by itself.  Note that this is really only possible with certain commands as most commands are dependent on others.
• Personal Notebook tabs available that are not connected to your preset.  You can use these to keep notes on stuff like what values work best with certain parameters.  I know some of you have added that type of info to your presets.  This lets you have the information available even if you make a new preset.
• A new Filter Erosion command that offers a LOT of control over adding erosion to the map.  Note that this is a very complex command and documentation for it will come slowly as it will take a lot of work to document what every parameter does.  But feel free to test it out.  You can get some really nice erosion effects with it.
• A new way to smooth riverbanks that can let you have smooth riverbanks even when a river goes through hills.  Note that unless you really smooth riverbanks with the command, you'll still have steep riverbanks if the river goes through a mountain.
• The ability to have rivers follow the borders of biomes.
• The ability to spawn a single town at a location of your choice without needing to use a mask map.  Note that this point is just the starting point for the town and it will spread out from that point.
• New parameters for creating towns that allow you to adjust the width of the outskirt district and create more random districts within the town, which can be a big improvement for mega city maps so you don't just have really large blocks of each district.
• The Comment command has been finished and now lets you use it in your presets.  You will see it used in the updated default presets to highlight things like what section is for mountains.  You'll also notice that the default presets make more use of colors for each section to make it easier to see the different sections.
• Icons have been added for the commands that will give you an idea of what the commands are and will highlight the related commands.  For example, if you click on a heightmap command, the heightmap icon will appear on all heightmap commands.
• Teragon should no longer crash if you have map names in Update Preview that are not valid or not yet created.  This was the most common cause of a crash.

These are just some of the many updates and new features available.  Check it out now.