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Some of the settings seem obvious, though it's not very clear what values you want to use to get a specific result.
Beyond that, I'm not sure though if there is any indepth information regarding specific settings in the file. One way to figure out the settings is to do a series of tests where you start with a baseline, use the same seed and ingame settings, and then either set each variable to it's minimum or maximum setting to figure out what if any effect a particular setting has. I'd be tempted to do some tests, but don't have a lot of time.
Valley: basically flat areas.
River: basically water.
Ridge Height: Basically range for ridge height.
Ridge Scales: Basically a scale for the ridge. I assume that 0 and 1 are on opposing sides of the mountain ridges.
Ridge Probability: Range of likelihood of ridges to occur.
Ridge Main Valley Factor: Multiplier likely related to how large it can occur in a valley, if at all.
Ridge Pass Factor: Multiplier for access to mountain ridge.
Ridge Noise: Basically how flat or how hilly a ridge can be. You're more likely to have more hills with negatives on the maximum.
Valley Length: Basically length size of valley.
Valley Extra Valleys: Basically a count for the number of valleys beyond the default.
Valley zOffset: Basically where you want to position the default terrain with sea level. More negative means more water, more positive means less water.
Valley Probability: Range of likelihood of valleys to occur.
Valley width: Basically the base width of valley.
Valley Width (Length) Factor: The multiplier for the width of the valleys.
River Width Factor: Basically width multiplier for river.
River Width: Range of base width for river.
River Allow On Terrain: Allows small ponds.
River Probability: Likelihood of Rivers to occur.
From playing around with the settings a lot, and testing each individual thing, I've managed to roughly work out the following:
Firstly (as someone else on the forum worked out before me), for any setting that lists "High" and "Low" variants, the "High" version relates to the "Hilly" terrain preset, "Low" relates to the "Flat" preset, and the "Medium" preset appears to take the average of the two.
The ridges part of map generation seems to work in a partly "cellular" way, with each random cell of the map taking on random height attributes, allocated between "ridgeMinHeight" and "ridgeMaxHeight", while "ridgeProbability#" affects the percentage of cells that become ridges at all, instead of lowland.
The random height per-cell seems to be multiplied with the actual ridge-shapes, which is defined in a height-map file "terrain/ridge.tga".
"ridgeScale0" and "ridgeScale1" are a bit strange. I thought they'd be different spatial-scales, but they appear to be height-multipliers on top of the allocated ridge height.
"ridgeScale0" relates to the largest, coarse mountain peaks, while "ridgeScale1" relates to the finer foothills.
One thing to note - I tried setting "ridgeScale1" to a negative value, to make all the foothills be lakes/waterways and peaks form the land... I actually got the best-looking map this way, BUT, the game's automatic town placement fails almost completely, I think because it automatically avoids mountain ridges, and insists on only placing towns on lowland and foothills.
I hope the devs change this - custom maps don't seem to suffer that issue.
It works fairly nicely the other way round - "ridgeScale0" to a large negative value - then all the mountain peaks become deep carved lakes.
"Valley" settings affect how the game carves a main valley through the map either side of the central river it generates - this appears to be applied after ridge generation, so will "pull-down" hills to meet the river within a specific distance either side.
"ridgeMainValleyFactor" is a straight multiplier on that effect... anything less than "1.0" will cause the river to carve a deeper and deeper sheer chasm through the hills, rather than have them dip smoothly down to the river edge. Sounds cool, but it's actually a bit too sharp an effect and looks unnatural, so usually best left at 1.0, or very close if you want to steepen the river banks slightly.
"ridgePassFactor" pulls down smaller valleys between ridge "cells", to break up long chains of mountains/hills. Turning it down to 0.0 will make the map massively more mountainous.
"noiseScale#" settings are the first thing in the file, but I think they're a post-process over the ridge generation. It appears to be a straight fine-scale random noise pattern that adds "character" to the broader strokes of the ridges. Set it too high, and you'll get an unnaturally crumpled look to everything... and make it generally hard to build much. Set it too low, and you'll have an unnaturally smooth, polished-looking landscape.
River "widthFactor", "minWidth" and "maxWidth" are fairly clear - a multiplier on default width, and multipliers on the random width variation.
"allowSourceOnTerrain" is another one that sounds cool, but is of limited utility. Sometimes when you generate a very winding river, the river generation will fail completely, and you'll end up with map with no river at all, and no "mainValley" either! "allowSourceOnTerrain" seems to stop river gen failing as often... but only by allowing a river to terminate abuptly in the middle of the map somewhere.
River "probability" didn't seem to do anything - any time I tweaked it on its own, I got the same identical map every time...
Valley settings:
"length" is strange - a river and its corresponding valley usually *must* cross the map to work correctly. Lower length sometimes causes the river to only generate on half the map, which causes a massive fault-line across the center, where the valley gen stops abruptly. This can actually be a useful tool to examine the profile of the valley being carved, as you can see a "before-and-after" effect either side of the ridge.
Higher lengths can work oddly too - they'll sometimes cause rivers to criss-cross the map a couple of times, which works well with increased curvature to make very random, organic landscapes, but it can also cause the river gen to fail entirely, or end in the middle of the map.
"curvature" is fun - bumping it up to 2 or 3 makes super-windey rivers, but it's a bit unstable. Some map seeds will work out great... some will glitch horribly.
"width" and "lengthWidthFactor" seem to do variations of the same thing - widen or narrow the valley cutting. Might be that one is for a more "v-shaped" cutting, and one is smoother... but I really haven't tested it enough to tell.
"probability0" and "probability1" I *think* affect primary river branching, and secondary branching respectively... but they're verry unpredictable, so I haven't pinned it down.
"extraValleyCount" didn't seem to do anything at all - all my tests were identical with and without.
lastly, a negative "zOffset" will raise the water level above the banks of the river, and so flood the surrounding valleys too. You can get some dramatically different maps this way, with interesting coastlines, fjords, etc...
If you've been reading the forums regularly you would know that canophone has done rather a lot of testing - so I'd say this post was based on empirical evidence rather than speculation.
(just like your reply)
Yes, I used 'basically' because I don't claim to have all the details. And it doesn't sound like there's a lot of disagreement. But the "high and low" part doesn't really lead the same hilly result for noise as for everything else, though one might assume.
Yes, that was a little dickish of me, sorry canophone. Edited that part out.
It just struck me as similar to what I initially guessed certain settings would do, and after exhaustive testing found didn't work the way I expected at all.
All my observations are based off reloading the game hundreds of times, and reusing the exact same settings, map size and seed, so I could observe the differences - often by leaving the viewpoint at its default position when the map first loads, zooming fully out, and taking a screengrab - then I could flip between them later to compare.
It does apply the same to the Noise settings as everything else... it's just that noise doesn't define the shape of the terrain in any significant way, unlike in most other games - the broad shape is defined entirely by ridge generation, and then valley carving applied on top... noise only adds local "crunchiness" to the hills that are already there. Hilly maps by default are a little more crunchy than flat maps.