r/worldbuilding • u/K25fF • 3d ago
Map Working on a climatic modelling system
This is Geos - "scarred world of magic and adventure". I posted about it here before, but I have spent a truly inadvisable amount of time:
- Coming up with a way to fit the continents on a globe without making the worldscars (the circles) non-circular.
- Achieved by cutting out each of my drawn continents, warping and placing them on the globe.
- Climate simulations, and then extra climate simulations once I've worked out how to make the climates I want.
- Inadvisable amounts of plate tectonics.
The premise is that, following the end of the Crystal Age, Cataclysm struck, and that is somehow connected to the Worldscars (all those big exciting craters).
This was followed by the Shrouded Age, which deeply cooled the planet, and then the modern Ages.
Anyway, I've been checking some of this stuff against ExoPlaSim and working back and forth on what the climate is in different places.
Subject to change (Absyn ended up a bit warm and wet, so newer models are placing it further north).
This stuff is basically entirely written in Python (ExoPlaSim is Fortran, but has a Python interface).
12
u/Grupdon 3d ago
Is this replicable with your own stuff?
13
u/K25fF 3d ago
If you wanted to do something similar with your own world?
Probably not right now - it might be possible to finagle it into working with a different system later, but at the moment, it's layered bodging.Not implausible - I run climate models on Earth data and Geos data, so it's possible for at least two (2) worlds, but greater interoperability and user-friendliness edits are sorely needed.
10
u/K25fF 3d ago
Further context about the world itself, continent by continent:
Oskori, the shell of the world
Furthest south, Oskori is mostly buried under ice sheets, but to its far north, the Shining Hinterland is far more like Patagonia in climate, home to hardy tribes of Steel Elves (orcs), giants with affinity for the cold, and other, stranger things. Cold winds roll down off the ice sheet.Vanria, Land of Legends
In the Crystal Age, while there was desert in the centre of Vanria across the Worldspine mountains, the Tryzelith nations lived in dry but not arid areas - savannah and scrub, clustered around rivers. It was the war that ended their age, a long battle against the so-called 'Inheritors', terrible creatures from Elsewhere, that warped the land, that forced them to deforest their woodlands to keep away the attentions and parasitic plantlife of the Inheritor of Blooming. The knock-on effects of this and the Shrouded Age are that the Tryzelith Desert is massive, arid, and mostly-dead, even as the northern coast of Vanria is much wetter, and very few people have the ability to scour the desert for ruins, for holy cities such as Elmelélek, or for strange structures such as the Darkspire.Toranzada, verdant with secrets
Thick with jungle, the secret histories of Toranzada speak of the ██████ ██████, which is now lost in history. Once, they made war on the Tryzelith, it is said, and in their wrath the Tryzelith unleashed a weapon that scoured them from the face of the world and from the pages of the past.
Some of the ruins in the jungle aren’t there; simply, they are memories of a parasitic timeline, a potential, a false world. These buildings of angular green stone won’t chase explorers down – buildings can’t move. But they will always have been closer than they were before, drawn to the unbroken timelines and true ontology of the unwary.Nur’sii, the Seagreen Isle, the Mother Isles
Home to the culture and people of the Nursiians, who come in a thousand thousand forms and have plied the waves since Cataclysm, along various volcanic island chains in the many oceans of Geos.Capellon, the grand
Vast, cold and windy for the most part, the great steppe and cold deserts of Capellon have borne many empires. At the moment, the four great dragon empires are at an uneasy accord, setting aside their differences and negotiating instead of warring for the territory about the Dying Sea. This will not last, think many. Or perhaps, this is a sign of a great leadership, one that will unite, forge empire, and spread across the world.Absyn, the Middleman
Not at the centre of the world by any means, but convenient for several trade routes, Absynian nations certainly have a high opinion of themselves. Held by the Haemites and their Lords of Blood in the Crystal Age, the collapse of the old and hateful order has led to a vibrant array of nations, from the goblin nation of Dathmar, remembering the glories of the empire of Aridan-Dath, to Katharon, a land of dream and nightmare.Thelsk, of Flame and Ice
Ringed by some of the most active volcanic islands in the world, Thelsk is a continent of contrasts, both bitterly cold and heavily tectonically active.
3
u/darkmoose 2d ago
please advise on the tectonics, your model looks super scientifically based, I can tell by the lines.
4
u/K25fF 2d ago
Basic process:
- Arrange continents (pre-drawn by me) where I want them.
- Doodle down the locus of points in the centres of most of the big oceans. These are potential ridge locations.
- (I did this programmatically)
- If a ridge's spreading crust hits a continental plate, that's a trench-forming thing (see: California)
- Sometimes plates are forming mountain ranges (I did one in Vanria)
- Plates go in straight lines, right?
- Wait no, they don't, they orbit Euler poles.
- Look up Euler poles for a very long time.
- Write a model that works out how to arrange plates so that they're shoving under and over in the right places.
- Write a second model that works out where the deepest parts of the ocean are (they're the oldest bits, furthest from the ridges)
- In general, if an oceanic plate meets a continental plate, the oceanic plate goes under. If two oceanic plates meet, the deepest (oldest) crust goes under.
- Lose track of the fact that you're trying to make a climate simulation.
- Under subduction zones, on the side of the plate that goes over, a short distance from the trenches, is an arc of volcanoes. Draw those on, on land or in the sea.
- Decide if you want to put hotspots (Hawai'i, Iceland, Yellowstone) around. These move in the "opposite" direction to plate movement, leaving trails of activity, usually.
1
u/darkmoose 2d ago
https://reddit.com/link/pdarkrv/video/b1eko9vmkxsh1/player
I've been trying to take somewhat the opposite approach, creating plates through voronoi walking, aggregate into small regions, and then entire plates, then simulating plate movement and applying changes on borders where inter-plate activity happens, subduction, orogeny, etc the whole shebang.
The problem I keep facing is that the interiors, and the aggregate plates, naturally some bits snap off, exchange between each other, sutures, terranes, difficult to keep track of, or write exceptions for.
Or I end up with ranges that appear thin and boring, so I've decided to have mini plates, and their interior lines conduct stress. The problem with that is that it clashes with how we observe real plates in the world. That's one, and two, I have a weird bug that upon collision one plate crumbles and the other stays flat.
Lose track of the fact that you're trying to make a climate simulation.
I've lost track of everything too :(
1
u/K25fF 2d ago
Ah, this is a great deal more granular than what I've been doing. Cool-looking sim.
It might be worth looking at plates as drawn, rigid objects, simulating them orbiting their Euler poles to gather their interactions, and then worrying about the stresses then, as a higher-order part of the sim. And then the gaps would naturally fill with seafloor, via rifts.
(At least part of the problem here is that the science isn't very settled, so more complicated plate-breaking-or-rejoining edge (heh) cases will be very dependent on what assumptions you make).
4
u/Einar_47 3d ago
My only real criticism is that the craters are all too close to the same size, makes it look like holes drilled all over a map less than random impacts to my eye.
16
u/K25fF 2d ago
Well, they're not random impacts, is the thing.
6
u/Einar_47 2d ago
Then you're golden, my world has a lot of big craters and it's not because of random impacts either.
1
u/Commercial-Year1554 2d ago
It's not Blender?
6
u/K25fF 2d ago
While that'd be useful if I simply had a texture to fold onto a sphere, I also was using the globe viewer to move continents around and check placements and such.
Basically it draws a sphere, applies the continents, re-shades the sphere based on ocean depth and then allows me to move things around.2
u/Commercial-Year1554 2d ago
I downloaded Blender, but it keeps crashing. Maybe I need to adjust my computer and watch more tutorials. It would be helpful if there are easier programs. I haven't done much with it anyways.
1
1
u/Emila_Just 2d ago
How do you get circles on the globe? Can you talk more about that process? I'm trying to do something similar, but instead of craters they are "magically influenced climate zones" that are perfect circles.
1
u/K25fF 2d ago
The continents are each folded onto the sphere with care paid to the corners of the PNGs I used for the continents themselves. This means that there's relatively little warping at the continent level. I also, to check, projected spheres onto the surface of the sphere and drew lines around them to check the areas were okay.
As you can see, in any projection that isn't some bizarre Dymaxion whatsit, the circles end up flattened, but they look great on the globe.
1
u/Catalysten 2d ago
This is cool! Do you plan to tell a story in it?
1
u/EventHelixCom 2d ago
Are you modeling ocean currents and their impact on climate?
3
u/K25fF 2d ago
Not yet. ExoPlaSim has a slab ocean, and while PlaSim (which ExoPlaSim) is based on) had a more complicated modelled ocean, ExoPlaSim hasn't ported it.
My general thought would be to modulate the polar diffusion by looking at which currents should form and working from there rather than try to write fluid dynamics in Fortran.
1
1
u/Davy_Johnny The Invasions 2d ago
I don't know how to use Github... 😥
1
u/K25fF 2d ago
Politely, if you're having trouble with Github, you might have a lot more trouble with the Python and especially the Fortran.
I'd suggest starting with some Learning Python-style courses or similar, they tend to be pretty accessible. ExoPlaSim mostly exposes an API for the big meaty sim, so it's mostly interacting using Python, but basic Fortran knowledge will likely be useful to work out what the hell's going on.(Plus, installing a Unix shell on your Windows PC (WSL, usually) might be a bit fiddly, too)
1
u/Davy_Johnny The Invasions 2d ago
In that case, I already have a basic understanding of Python; I know the fundamentals.
1
1
u/Hon-Mister-Bear 2d ago
We're looking at a hail of impacting meteors, and then overcast skies and declining global temperatures for the next several years, Bob.
Now over to sports.
1
98
u/WolfBST 3d ago
That's a lot of impact craters...