The best technique for designing the terrain of a world is to use the designer tools provided with Xconq. The details of how these tools work depends on the interface, but in general they resemble the tools found in paint programs. Some interfaces also give you the option of rescaling the map, so that you can fine-tune the size and positioning of the terrain.
Another technique is to write a program that translates data from another
source (such as NASA satellite data) into Xconq format.
However, if you take a rectangular array of data and just wrap an
area (terrain ...))
form around it,
then everything will appear to be tilting to the left.
To fix this, have your program map the cell at x, y
in the rectangular array to x - y / 2, y
before writing.
You must discard values whose new x
coordinate is negative,
or else wrap them around to the right side of the area, although
that is usually only reasonable for cylindrical areas.
The crudest technique is to try to build terrain by using a text editor. The coordinate system is Cartesian oblique, with the y axis tilted to form a 60-degree angle with the x axis, so it can be difficult to relate typed-in characters to the final appearance. Landforms in the file should appear to be leaning to the left, if they are to appear upright during play. However, sometimes text editing is necessary, for instance when you need to change every instance of a terrain type to something else. (Incidentally, some of the large real-world maps in the library were produced by coding all the terrain types from an atlas onto graph paper, typing them in, then fixing the tilt as described above.)
Incidentally, areas should have some distinguishing terrain
around the edges; this prevents player confusion that sometimes
happens when there is no other clue as to where the edge might be.
However, this is not enforced by Xconq, and you can put
whatever you like along the edges.
Randomly generated worlds normally use the value of
the global variable edge-terrain
.