How to create a world map using C language? - c

Question

How to create a world map using C language?
Here, I want to generate a 1000*1000 two dimensional array of world map. Within the array, the land part is marked with value 1 and the sea part is marked with value 0. Is there any simple way to create?

Answer 1

Obviously, there's no algorithm which describes the shape of the coastline of the continents ;)
But you could use e.g. Smrender (http://www.abenteuerland.at/smrender/), feed it with the coastline of e.g. OpenStreetMap or Naturalearthdata and a single rule. Let it create a PNG image with 1000x1000 pixels.
EDIT:
With ImageMagick (convert) you can directly convert a PNG into a C header file as an array.
Go to Openstreetmap.org (or Googlemaps), zoom out until you see the whole world, make a screenshot, open it in your favorite image manipulation program and cut and resize it to 1000x1000, then run convert input.png output.h.
Bernhard

Answer 2

I wrote a answer in game development some hours ago that can help you, heres the topic, it's written in javascript, but it won't be hard to translate to c.
In the example you fill the whole map of 0's and then you trace a path randomly, if you want to smooth the map later you can make a snippet that loops all the watter tiles and converts them to land if there are 3 or more land tiles adjacent to it, do it 40-60 times and you will get a smoother shore and no "holes" in the continent.
EDIT
Updating the answer with a demo in C.
I've not tested it, but if you include the headers and checks the code, this is the answer.
//Create and populate the map
int mapsize = 100;
int map[mapsize*mapsize];
for(int t = 0; t < mapsize*mapsize; t++) map[t] = 0;
//make the path
int currPos[2] = {0,50};
map[currPos[0]+(currPos[1]*mapSize)] = 1;
int landTiles = 20000;
for(var l = 0; l < landTiles; l++){
int dir[2] = {RANDOM_BETWEEN_-1_AND_1, RANDOM_BETWEEN_-1_AND_1};
int next[2] = {currPos[0]+dir[0], currPos[1]+dir[1]};
map[next[0]+(next[1]*mapSize)] = 1;
currPos = next;
}
//Draw the map
for(var row = 0; row < mapSize; row++){
for(var col = 0; col < mapSize; col++){
cout << map[col+(row*mapSize)];
}
cout << endl;
}

Answer 3

You could have some program or script (taking as input some representation of some image of the Earth) which generates a long C file like
const char map[1000][1000] = {
{'0', '1', //.... etc for the first fow
},
{'0', '0', '0', '1', //... etc
}
/// etc for other rows
};
See also XBM for an example.