EXP-016generativeLive
Contours.
A topographic map with nothing underneath it. Press anywhere and a mountain rises under your finger, every contour ring redrawing itself around the summit in real time; switch to carve and dig until the sea floods back in. The sheet opens the way it works: the water drains off the land, and each ring appears the moment the sea drops past its level.
Marching squares · Live terrain
Press anywhere to raise a mountain.
Hold and the land keeps rising under your finger, contour by contour. Switch to carve and dig until the sea floods in. Drag to draw ridges and valleys.
Bench notes
- The algorithm
- Marching squares, the workhorse that turns weather models and CT scans into pictures. The terrain is a grid of heights; every frame, each little square of four values is checked against each elevation, and where a contour crosses its edges a line segment is interpolated. Around eleven thousand squares, every sixtieth of a second, from scratch.
- The cartography
- Borrowed from real topographic sheets: light minor contours every 30 meters, a heavier index line every fourth, dashed bathymetric lines under the water, and coral summit marks with live elevations once a peak clears the treeline. The compass, scale bar, and graticule crosses are furniture, but a map without them never feels like a map.
- What to notice
- Spacing is slope: where the rings crowd together the ground is steep, where they spread it's gentle. That's the entire trick of a contour map, and you can feel it here by making the terrain yourself. Then stop pressing: the land keeps settling, because the map slowly erodes everything you build.