This is an overview shot, with the relief exagerated by something like 15 times to make it visible on a global scale. You can change the exageration on the fly.

The Thetwick area (features prominently in The Half Elven Orphan), with map overlays turned on. You can see my new snow feature lays over the top of it for currently unknown reasons.

Exact same shot with map overlays off. As you can see, I’m still working on refining the brushes to be able to get natural heights. Keeping rivers flowing downhill is an interesting thing for the tool to have to accomodate.

As I’m working on this, I’m beginning to think that maybe I will be able to place buildings and plots with this eventually. Mainly I’m wondering if I can keep it usable. This now already has a two-step system where it shows the changes made immediately, then bakes it in in a background process.

Alagariel practicing sword forms (I.33 again) at night, with Maiden’s Tower in the background.

I’m doing this because I’m finding it’s very hard for an author to generate promotional material. Walls of text don’t draw people in to a post, pictures and video does. So, this is my solution. Get assets into Godot, make compositions and make stills or animations with them. I’ve used Claude Code to help me make the tools for this (I would never have had the time for it otherwise), but the creative input is my own or the artists I hire. Besides the widespread irrational hatred for generative AI, it’s also just very poor at making the image you want. I’ve experimented with it, but I’d say generating 10,000 images per usable one is about the hit rate. It’s a waste of time, quite aside from the fact that you never know how closely what it flops out is plagiarising someone’s work.

I have more ideas what I might want to do with these 3D assets in the longer term, but I’m a very long way from getting any of that done.

Then more zoom below, so that the Thetwick environs map becomes visible too. You can find the map here if you want to see the original.

I then analysed all the projected layers to automatically trace them into an OGIS format that is then displayed on the globe again.

I’m going to take it further as I need it of course. I’ve got some tools now, to draw hills, roads, rivers and settlements, so it should be much easier to map my writing from now on. Quite pleased with these steps, if I do say so myself.

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.

Attributed to Confucius. No idea if he actually said it, but it encapsulates things reasonably well.

I’m busy editing Dropship Down which is taking longer as real life work gets in the way. I’ve also made a little progress expanding the section of The Value of Nobility (Alagariel II) that I wasn’t completely happy with yet. I still have the ambition to get both books out this year and I’ve asked Daria to start thinking about the cover for Alagariel II.

Sales are still slow. There’s the occasional sale around the world, but it’s obviously nothing like what I want to see. I’m discovering that it’s essentially required to have some sort of visual media for a post to catch on and when you’re a writer that’s not something you have a huge supply of. Daria makes me some artwork to use alongside posts, but she deserves to be paid for her work and is doing art school and all, which puts a limit on that. AI is widely reviled, often beyond reason, and it seems many are more than happy to spew hate on any AI use, so I’m a little reticent there, even though it could add some atmosphere in those few cases when what is generated actually aligns with my vision.

What remains is making more of my own artwork, but I’m not much good and things would be more like technical drawings. For the sci-fi setting that’s fine, but it doesn’t work that well for the Tales of Vatan setting.

In any case, I will soft-launch Dropship Down on itch.io very soon now. That release will be updated as I do more editing, but in the unlikely event that there’s someone who can’t wait to get there hands on my first sci-fi book, stay tuned.

I was wondering for long time what to call my two main series, and, I at least, am pleased that I’ve settled on an answer.

This is a sketch by Daria. It depicts a dark forest somewhere on Vatan. Obviously I know where, but since it features somewhere in Tales of Vatan: Alagariel IV or V, I’m not telling you where it is yet.