#nigran gallery

[view-from-a-warm-place]

014 // Screen Capture No.2: "Welcome to Nigran Cavern!”

Better late than never! As promised, here are a few screen captures from the "Nigran Cavern” region of maps. They even have motion for you! Hot damn! :y

The first MP4-format video shows a pair of rock arches weaving between waterfalls, pouring in from the Opark countryside above. (Sorry for the graininess; I have yet to get video compression worked out in an elegant way...)

The second gif-format animation shows the vista from the mouth of Nigran Cavern as it connects to the scarp running through Opark Forest. I am not completely sold on the colouring in this view just yet, so please expect it to change at least once or twice...

In both maps, all of the sprites and static artwork you see was made in ASEprite. Animated effects like the sunbeams and waterfalls are generated on-the-spot, in code, using NumPy, which I regard for various reasons as the best mistake I probably could have made here. (I will explain why in a future post! <3)

The Nigran underground region will probably consist of six or eight maps when it is complete. I plan on putting some good stuff down there for you, too!

I have really enjoyed working on Nigran Cavern so far; I learned a lot of different ways to use a tileset (more on this in future posts), found some new ways to use old effects, and created some new effects with applications in other regions.

I will very probably get into the details of these effects later, and how they have been used, but I will save this for a follow-up post actually showing off the material itself. For now, please enjoy this completely optional and technically-questionable expository moment:

Nigran Cavern is a system of dolomite solution chambers and corridors stretching thousands of miles in all directions beneath Luan II’s Beylan region, and into other adjacent cavern networks in neighbouring regions. The caverns, like many others worldwide, were created as the GEOMATs lifted the Omalla landmass and other continents above their resting depths in Luan II’s then-shallow oceans, causing their original watertables to flow outward. Carbon and sulfur acids produced by settled organic cycles in the biosphere and introduced artificially to accelerate the creation of soils through weathering and erosion leached into the caverns through cracks in hardier rock and sinkholes and dissolved the more soluble materials beneath. Eventually, these cracks formed large underground cisterns and rivers, absorbing water from the surface watertable and from creeks flowing into ‘swallowhole’ sinkholes.

Because the underground geology of Luan II is relatively new, sophisticated patterns of stalagmites and stalactites are rarely seen-- the chambers shown, though they vary in age, are all less than four centuries old. Some features are less the result of dissolution or erosion and more the remnants of Luan II’s far more ancient lava-extrusion processes; others may have been created by seismic forces as recently as months ago. The GEOMAT terraforming process creates new and unique phenomena on each planet that undergoes it!