The Origins of the Kerbin Terrain.

[Tuna7]

Nevermind.......

[HarvesteR]

That map is an example provided in one of the Libnoise tutorials, which is an opensource numerical noise library we still use to generate terrain in KSP.

The very earliest versions of Kerbin were using the map as a placeholder, and after the game went public people started founding countries and creating all sorts of stories around it. We didn't have the heart to replace it by a unique one, even though it was a few tweaked seed values away.

These days, the original map isn't used at all anymore, but we've generated our height maps from it (and from that generate the planetary surface maps), so the continental layout remains very similar.

Cheers

[AustralianFries]

-snip-

Thanks for the clarification, HarvesteR.

[BossSquirrelz]

Interesting...

[Unistrut]

I had some friends working on a Space Hulk style game on the Amiga and the death sound was just this little "DING" noise. They wanted a scream or meaty crunching sound, something appropriate, but they didn't have one. So there was just this "DING". They left it in so long that they became conditioned to panic any time they heard that noise. They'd be in line at the dining commons and some piece of kitchen equipment would go "DING" and they'd all twitch. That was the early nineties and he actually still does it.

I guess what we've learned today is that developers should be aware - fans may get attached to your placeholder art...