RhinoBuilder
I needed maps for a game and discovered I was terrible at drawing believable worlds. Hand-coding them as text was unbearably slow, so I tried drawing color-coded biome maps in Paint and wrote a program to read the image pixel by pixel. It worked—badly. Image noise made the resulting terrain a mess.
Eventually I realized I was solving the wrong problem. Instead of building a better way to draw worlds, I could build software that created them. RhinoBuilder generates elevation and proper slope progression, sends rivers and lava downhill, and then does the part I’m most proud of: it lets the geography create the climate.
The engine considers the world’s spin direction, humidity and temperature, then analyzes the terrain it just created. Mountain ranges affect what happens downwind; dry regions and deserts can emerge because of the mountains themselves instead of being painted onto the map afterward. Version 1 proved the idea. Version 2 made it usable. Version 3 is where I’m trying to make the thing genuinely ridiculous.
And it all runs in a browser. Nothing to install, no frameworks, no server-side engine—just efficient JavaScript doing the work locally.
Open the old project →
