[muduri]

The characters in my fantasy campaign haven't made it out of a small corner of the world yet, and before they do I'd like to do a better job of matching topography and climate. I'm thinking of creating (or better yet, just using, if one exists already) a script to take a topographic surface, apply wind and ocean current patterns to it, and then derive climate.

1) Does such a thing exist already? Looking online I see several scripts that generate everything procedurally from scratch, but not one that lets you input your own topography. Part of the appeal of course is that you could work back and forth - "ah, we need a savanna kingdom here surrounded by rainforest hunter-gatherers. Time to reverse the slope and create a Dahomey Gap!"

2) Does three variables (average temperature, summer rainfall, winter rainfall) sound like the right amount to generate climate? I was originally planning to unify rainfall anually but it seems like Italy's vegetation is distinct from the American Southeast partly because of dry vs wet summers. I suppose though that one would have to introduce some intermediate factors like pressure before yielding something emergent like an ITCZ.

3) Programming language considerations? I get the impression a bunch of you are talented programmers; for better or worse, coming from architecture I'd be working more from Adobe/Rhino/Grasshopper/Ladybug, which if nothing else I guess should be helpful for the topography manipulation. But could cobble together just enough scripting to use something else if it called for modifying an existing procedure or there was something that just couldn't be done in Grasshopper.

Any suggestions on these, or any other follow-up thoughts, welcome! Happy to share the script when it's done also. Thanks!