Wind generation. Basically a 1 to 1 simulation of how wind works on Earth. Air pressure and the coriolis effect are the driving elements.
Humidity/rainfall map. Uses wind generation to simulate 262 thousand gusts of wind. They pick up humidity over oceans, drop off humidity on land, and are affected by altitude, temperature, and speed.
I think I am going to throw this work away.
The humidity map looks really cool but it is too chaotic and uncontrollable. Essentially I'm having the same issues as my original plate tectonics approach. Instead of simulating the physical processes of Earth, I need to program the end results. The above map is mostly desert and just doesn't feel right.
This different map also shows some of the problems.
My new solution will probably be pixel based. Just do operations on the grid instead of doing them with a approximation based system. This will save a lot of time so I might recalculate climates for winter and summer. (or I'll fake it using interpolation, depends on if I want trees/forests to impact climate simulation).
On the gameplay side of things, I think I've figured out a kinda cool thing for multiplayer. The forum RPG worked great with traveling from city to city since we could just ignore it until we arrived automatically. This wouldn't work though in a non browser game. Players need to be able to play it actively instead of passively.
In singleplayer, the player is free to fast forward the world whenever they please. In multiplayer, every player needs to have the same game speed. It's impossible from a game perspective to let one player fast forward while others play at regular speed. Weird time bubbles would break the background simulation so that just really really isn't an option.
The simple solution would be to just increase travel speeds for players. That however makes the map small. A player on the opposite edge of the world could show up in your city in only a few minutes.
The crazy solution is parallel dimensions.
Players are blessed by gods and have some supernatural abilities, so why use that for this too? Say a player spends an hour doing stuff in a city. They have shopped, had conversations, done a quest or two, whatever. Theoretically there would be a parallel world where the player decided to skip the city and walk to the next one over.
The player who spent time in the city can jump to the other reality where they are now at the neighbor city. Instant fast travel. They could do some things in that city, and then jump back over to a reality where they never left the first city.
This might sound like a needlessly complex way to describe a standard video game mechanic, but it has some important differences.
The parallel world must have diverged from the current reality within the past hour. Players cannot fast travel to the other side of the map, they can only fast travel within their local region.
Players can fast travel an unlimited amount of times with no cool down, but they can never reach destinations sooner by using fast travel. If it takes 10 hours to cross the world, it would still take 10 hours to cross the world. The only difference is that the player can spend time in a location without it increasing their travel time.
TLDR: fast travel within the local region.
