I’ve long wanted to get a lot of the data from my settings into a 3D engine. Ideally I’d eventually like to edit maps directly on a globe, including things like defining elevation roads, rivers, towns and whatnot. When I grow up, who knows, I may have a bunch of the work done for a game already too.
I’ve chosen to work in Godot 4, it’s open source and I’ve supported it in the past. Guess the idea of leaving the IP of the basis for you 3D program in the hands of someone else just never seemed like a good idea to me.
Since I have never had time to actually sit down and learn everything I needed to build something in an engine like Godot, Claude Code is somehting of a godsend for me. I know what I want and how I want it, and I do have some experience programming. I’m finding that with that basis, getting Claude to do the drudge work is saving me massive amounts of time.
Below is the first thing that I might call a result. My master map of Vatan projected onto a globe of the dimensions I defined for the planet. Vatan is very hot round the equator and very cold at the poles. It’s far larger than earth, but it’s core is less dense than Earth’s Iron core, so gravity is about the same. There’s about an Earth’s worth of habitable climate in each of the hemispheres.
I’m going to put the moon in, and simulate rotation which will give me time differences and all sorts of other detailed goodies.
Someday I’d like to release a RPG setting for Tales of Vatan, and to me personally a tool that will tell you when sunrise and sunset is something that would make a setting feel far more alive. To me, using these kinds of tools to get the physics of a world right makes it much more alive.
Next step is analysing all the other materilal I already have getting it into the engine, and building mapping tools to be able to extend the map detail in the 3D engine. I also want to give things a live link to the database, so that sites described there are linked to places on the 3D globe. Godot is a game engine of course, so I’m also trying to make a scene for Thetwick, just as a test. Not nice enough to show anyone yet, but something else interesting to explore.