Dave LeCompte (really) wrote:
>  Also, there's a pretty good paper about the tricks that the "Tribal
>  Trouble" guys used to make their terrain here:
>  http://oddlabs.com/download/terrain_generation.pdf

That paper was really useful. I was able to implement a version of the 
Voronoi (bubble/ridge thing) with some fiddling, and accidentally made 
what appears to be a fractal by accident. It's attached as 
"my_generation.py" if you want to see the messy code. The part that was 
hard to figure out was what the paper described as:
height = (distance to nearest point)*(arbitrary constant 1)
The distance ranges from 0 to many thousands, so what's a good way to 
convert that to a 0-255 range or the 0.0-1.0 range used in the paper? I 
ended up doing it in an arbitrary way.

I see that <http://home.scarlet.be/zoetrope/voronoi/>  has a Python 
implementation of Voronoi code as a "Crystalize" filter for images.

I also tried to implement a diamond-square algorithm, but something's 
not quite right about it. If I force the squares to be higher than 
normal (adding 64 to the height values), I can see that it's calculating 
all the pixels in the image, but normally most of the image ends up 
black. The code for that is attached as "my_generation3.py"; anyone know 
how to fix it? The problem seems to be that I'm using a 256x256 bitmap, 
and the calculation of each cell's "neighbors" is off by one pixel or 
something where it wraps around the edges, so that it finds zeroed 
pixels instead of the already-calculated ones.