Around The World, Part 10: Fixing the climate

The previous post ended with a cliffhanger: how would we get rid of all the arid zones (pink) in the Köppen climate classification? An alternating game of spot-the-difference and whack-a-mole ensues.
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The previous post ended with a cliffhanger: how would we get rid of all the arid zones (pink) in the Köppen climate classification? An alternating game of spot-the-difference and whack-a-mole ensues.

Last time, I described how I’m generating different weather patterns based on the season. That data is already useful for the game, to decide the weather at one particular place and time, but it’s also essential when figuring out the local biome, which is what we’re doing today.

In the last post, we developed some basic but useful algorithms to generate temperature and rain maps for an entire year. However, these assumed that the weather is constant throughout the year. As any citizen of Earth knows, that is not quite true, so let’s fix it!

We now have prevailing wind patterns going, so it’s time to turn to the other two important parameters that define the weather: rain and temperature.

In the previous post, I described a failed attempt to solve this problem of converging winds:

Last time, we got some basic wind patterns going. However, there’s still a problem.

Now that we have a finalized height map of our generated world, it’s time to put something on the surface. But to know what to put there – forest, desert, grassland, ice – we have to know something about the local conditions. And to know those, we have to know about wind patterns.

In the last post, we added the effects caused by tectonic plates:
For several years now, the comments on this blog have been powered by the third-party service Disqus. Last Saturday, I received an e-mail from them:

In the previous post, we tackled generation of continent shapes using Voronoi cells and set some base heights using curves and simplex noise: