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—Discover01

What is World Generator

Archway World Generator is a standalone desktop application that builds the map a grand strategy game runs on.

It generates terrain from fractal noise, lets you repaint it by hand, cuts the result into provinces, groups those provinces into a hierarchy of territories, and writes the whole thing out as images and tables an engine can load.

It is a tool, not a library: a single executable, no installer, no dependency on Unreal Engine, no project to configure. You unzip it and run it.

The Terrain panel, as it opens — cliquer pour agrandirFig. 1.1

What it can do​

Procedural terrain​

  • Fractal noise in three flavours — Simplex, Cellular, Perlin — with FBm, Ridged and Ping-pong fractal modes
  • Reproducible: the same seed always gives the same world, on any machine
  • Three projections — Planar, Equirectangular, Mercator — with optional east-to-west wrapping
  • Domain warping, which turns rounded noise blobs into continents with inlets and peninsulas
  • Hypsometric curve, distributing elevation the way real terrain does: plains dominate, peaks are rare

Hand sculpting​

  • Raise, lower and set brushes, with shape, size, strength, falloff, noise and rotation
  • Direct painting of biomes and strata in the matching views
  • Stencil: load an image, trace it, or flood-fill terrain from it
Sculpting survives regeneration

Painted influence is stored separately from the noise. You can go back to the Terrain panel, change the seed, regenerate — your mountains stay where you put them.

Provinces​

  • Separate land and sea targets, each with its own irregularity
  • Per-stratum density — mountains can be more finely cut than plains — and per-biome modifiers on top
  • Micro-province cleanup with a size threshold
  • Hand editing: paint boundaries, create provinces, pick with the right button

Territory hierarchy​

  • Unlimited levels, each built from provinces or from the level below — duchies from counties, kingdoms from duchies
  • Automatic grouping with minimum and maximum size, sea excluded if wanted
  • Paint mode to assign a province to a territory by hand
  • Colour cascade: a territory's colour propagates down to its children

Masks​

  • Stratum overrides: replace an elevation band's shape with an image
  • Biome layer stack: import images as ordered layers, each painting one biome
  • Round trip: export every mask, edit it elsewhere, bring it back

Engine-ready export​

  • 16-bit heightmap as PNG and RAW, with control over bevelling, smoothing and anti-aliasing
  • Normal map derived from the final heightmap
  • Province map plus definition.csv and adjacencies.csv
  • One CSV per hierarchy level, with contiguous IDs from 1

The principles​

1. The seed is the document​

A world is reproducible from its seed and its settings. Copy the seed, paste it on another machine, you get the same world. The Saved seeds shelf exists because interesting worlds are found by chance, and writing the number on paper is not a workflow.

2. Nothing blocks the window​

Generation, preview rebuilds and exports all run off the main thread. The interface stays alive and says what it is doing; controls that would have to wait on a background job are visibly disabled rather than frozen.

3. Hand work is not disposable​

Regenerating terrain does not throw away what you painted. Undo is a single history covering map edits and hierarchy edits alike, so Ctrl+Z reverses the last thing you did, whichever panel you did it in.

4. Destructive actions ask first​

Discarding an edited world, or starting a multi-gigabyte generation, both prompt. Nothing else does — a prompt that always appears is a prompt people learn to dismiss without reading.

5. The file format is untrusted input​

A .wgen gets shared. The loader validates a file's entire structure before touching the world you have open: a corrupt or hostile file is refused rather than half-loaded over your work.

What it is not​

  • Not a renderer. It produces data; drawing it in-game is Archway's job.
  • Not a 3D terrain sculptor. Everything is a 2D field. No overhangs, caves or meshes.
  • Not multi-document. One world open at a time.

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