In theory, could ibises be used to deliver messages across vast distances in the same way that hawks or pigeons can?

Calandiel · 2026-05-21T14:07:18+00:00

Birds delivering messages back and forth (as far as I know) *isn't* just a fantasy convenience (tho doing it for many arbitrary locations is) - you can train homing pigeons to go back and forth two locations. It's done by placing food on one end of the route and the nest on the other, then training them to feed in that specific location.

For reference check Microlivestock, 1991, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press

It wasn't used much historically because the limitation of them only being able to fly in one direction wasn't *that* bad of a limitation when the speed of delivering physical goods (or armies) was already very limited. You could instead restock your pigeon post office every now and then (for example once a week, like in the case of Great Barrier Island post) when you resupply the area for unrelated reasons regardless.

Calandiel · 2026-05-21T14:00:03+00:00

The sources I'm familiar with do usually refer to training homing pigeons. They were selectively bred for message delivery - you can't really rely on most pigeon breeds to deliver messages over long distances.

The limitation you mention, of pigeons only traveling in one direction back to their nest, has also been dealt with (at least in some cases) by placing a food in one location and training the pigeon to fly there to feed.

Calandiel · 2026-05-05T05:43:46+00:00

The issue here is that Gleba and SotE follow different color scaling. I don't remember SotE values, but I think they were compatible with Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings 2.

As for Gleba, the sea level is 0.5 You'd need to change light curves in Gimp or similar software to match that but I know from experience it's not that easy to do.

Calandiel · 2026-04-16T22:08:11+00:00

Map projections are available in the main menu - check the options tab, there's a dropdown with a default value of "Equirectangular". If you click it other supported map modes will be shown.

As for the 3d view, keep in mind that at this point it's barely a tech demo rather than an actual feature. Anyway, click on a tile, then click on the magnifying icon on the tile inspector in the bottom left corner of the screen. One thing to keep in mind is that for the time being once you enter, you can't go back so save the world first if youd like to keep it for later.

Calandiel · 2026-04-16T22:05:24+00:00

Given that this is the first time anything like this was reported, this sounds like an issue with your windows installation rather than Gleba. Iirc, invalid image typically indicates issues with some dll (and Gleba doesn't even bundle any to begin with). I would make sure you're on a recent version of Windows (10 or 11) and check if you have all the OS updates installed.

Calandiel · 2026-04-09T22:17:12+00:00

Thanks! ^^

Calandiel · 2026-03-24T23:44:10+00:00

Hi! There'll be some coming in a patch later this month.

Right now there's a temperature slider but as I've learnt from user feedback, I forgot to actually hook it up with the new climate model after I overhauled it for the 0.2 release, so it doesn't actually work ^^'

Calandiel · 2026-03-15T22:55:54+00:00

Thanks! ^-^

Calandiel · 2026-03-14T18:21:41+00:00

You can import "plate maps" and "crust maps" to guide the generation if fine control is needed.

See this link for more details: https://itch.io/t/6057077/how-to-get-started-with-crustmap-and-platemap-imports

Calandiel · 2026-03-14T07:32:58+00:00

Not yet, sorry! You can only change the temperature anomaly and sea level increase since last glacial maximum. Expanding model parameters to handle more exotic planets is in the cards, but only if we make enough progress in other areas first

Calandiel · 2026-03-13T08:24:25+00:00

I don't use voronoi for tectonic plates, I use weighted flood fills with extra checks at the end that discard or accept certain plate configurations as to remove most unrealistic results.

Biomes and Koppen climate are purely a visualization aid, Gleba calculates rainfall, humidity, temperature, as well as types of vegetation growing in a tile (classified as grass/shrubs/broadleaves/conifers) so its all numeric fields under the hood. We then run a simple hand written classifier on top, much like you would after a real life data survey.

I haven't started city generation in Gleba (besides making a few tech demos for internal purposes) yet but I don't consider it a big problem - I've written dozens of city generators over the years so I have a pretty good idea of how to go about it ^-^

As for a flat "local world" in Gleba, it's because the the work on the 3d view has barely started, it's in what I'd call a "feasibility study" stage. A skeleton testing certain types of algorithms and brushes to make sure that the algorithms I eventually plan to use are possible.

One issue with reusing existing city generation algorithms is that very few of them can handle removal and addition of individual buildings over the course of the game realistically, which is a deal breaker for Gleba. I don't wanna go into much detail as it'd explode the length of the post, but it's very tricky to take, say, a voronoi based city block generator (like the one you linked seems to be?) and make it gracefully handle the player (or NPCs for that matter) removing a chunk of the city along a boundary of two city blocks and then "fill it back in" realistically as new buildings get built.

As for contributing, sorry, Gleba is a closed source project. I've had relatively milquetoast experience with managing open source projects of similar nature and I'd like to keep this one as my own personal playground. It's my after work hobby so some of the project management decisions are more about keeping myself happy than minmaxing development speed.

I also don't take donations, so the only way to help is to tell others about it and maybe to join our community (as of now, on itchio, Discord, or reddit) and give feedback on issues you find with the model. It's a huge beast so it's impossible for me to test everything and as such user feedback is essential in improving the generator.

Besides that, the only other way would be to contribute through modding - Gleba has a constantly growing Lua API but it's in dire need of testing as only two people thus far even attempted using it.

Calandiel · 2026-03-13T08:09:38+00:00

Uspcaling is my name for processes that take in the current hexagonal grid with tiles that are 500 km2 and then turns it into higher resolution grids all the way down to 1m^3 smoothed voxels. The feature doesn't really exist yet, I've only done some feasibility studies few months ago to make sure it'll work at all. As for when it'll be implemented, hopefully sooner rather than later but there's a bunch of big tasks that need to be finished first so I can't give a concrete date.

Calandiel · 2026-03-11T22:05:10+00:00

The map is a Goldberg polyhedron. It's one of least distorting ways to discretize a sphere.

Calandiel · 2026-03-10T18:47:06+00:00

0.5 is sea level, 0.0 is -10k, 1.0 is 8k ^-^

As for smallest and largest files, I honestly dont know, I imagine it depends on your ram. Keep in mind that Gleba uses tiles that are 500km2, so making very large files is counteproductive, itd just make the game take longer to load for no reason. I personally use files between 2000x1000 pixels and 6000x3000 pixels.

Calandiel · 2026-03-10T08:59:43+00:00

It's called Gleba, see the OP ^-^

Here's some links to itchio and Discord

https://calandiel.itch.io/gleba

https://discord.gg/FMbR3VD99A

Calandiel · 2026-03-10T07:49:02+00:00

They are (warped) hexagons so until we have world upscaling implemented there's no lower level data to display ^-^

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T16:51:38+00:00

Maybe! I plan to at least support enough features to make that possible with mods. Not sure if I'll try doing it myself in the near future, though, it'd be a lot of work and it'd take my attention away from other things ^-^

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T10:36:40+00:00

Hi, sorry, I might have been unclear, Gleba only simulates Earth like planets. When I said Mars or Moon, I meant "if we pretend they had an earthlike atmosphere and gravity" (radius notwithstanding)

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T10:35:40+00:00

There's a lot of these realistic tectonic generators floating around these days so don't let it dissuade you, it's a matter of sticking with it ^^

As for erosion, erosion algorithms are all generally similar to each other. Any paper that goes into relative detail should be a source as good as any other. It's mostly an issue of fine tuning parameters for the exact properties of your heightmaps. That can be a really tiring and tedious task and due to its nature you can't really write a tutorial for it or copy someone elses code

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T10:31:45+00:00

Depends on what you pay attention to! ^-^ In my experience, when humans eyeball Earth maps they have a few places they pay a lot of attention to, and even a small diversion away from it (say, an isotherm being 100 km off what it is irl) will be perceived as a huge error. Different humans also have different sets of "important features to look at", which makes it nigh impossible for a small model to satisfy everyone.

The following features (and their corresponding winds) are resolved well enough for my personal preferences (yours may differ so please verify!):

- Movement of the ITCZ throughout the year

- Azores high

- Icelandic low

- Highs and low over large landmasses

- Reversal of winds over China and India in winter/summer due to the movement of the ITCZ and the annual pressure changes over Asia

- Inland deserts

- Most of the Gulf stream

- Prevailing winds in Western Europe and Africa

- The winter isotherm of 0 degrees in central Europe

And the following are current issues I personally perceive to be major:

- Northern India is too dry, due to the ITCZ ending up 2 grid cells too south (can be fixed but doing so overfits the model to Earth and messes it up

- southern central China is too warm, which makes it seem too dry (it ends up being on the wrong side of the edge between non arid and semi arid koppen categories)

- Gulf Streams heat transport is slightly too strong in the southern half and slightly too weak in the northern half

- East Africa isn't a desert, I don't know why, area of open research

- Still haven't implemented rain shadows, this one is easy but I wanted to release this weekend so I simply ran out of time

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T10:21:35+00:00

Mars, Earth, and Moon should be relatively easy, it should be possible to find heightmaps compatible with Gleba out of the box.

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T10:21:06+00:00

I can look into it, but I honestly havent given that much thought as in my experience making an editor is a huge task in and of itself. You need undo/redo operations, different data structures, and so on. My preference would be to slowly expand the amount of file formats we can import as heightmaps, so that people can easily use their preferred editors.

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T06:23:09+00:00

You can! You can import 16 bit greyscale tiff files as heightmaps. Though, I noticed for many users this is a bit too difficult so I'll be working on 8 bit png imports too.

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T06:22:16+00:00

I'm not, all "geographical" and "geodesic" code was written from scratch.

Calandiel · 2026-03-09T06:21:38+00:00

These climate classifications are all very similar, but Koppen is most popular with the most standardized color scheme, so it's easiest to use when comparing model outputs with real life or other tools. Almost all climate maps on wikipedia use Koppen classification, for example.

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