And you thought the MP side was a pain ;D
I have finally tweaked & tuned the script almost to my own version of perfection, or more accurately to better work with my mod. The climate based terrain works like a charm, incidentally I saw you tried adding some noise to the rain to break up the banding, add that noise to the temperature map instead and you'll solve the banding without messing up the climate too much. Altitude based terrain is probably going in soon, not a big deal but since the data is there, why not use it?
I have a couple of issues I'd like to adjust a bit more, but I need your help since I don't fully understand how you're doing a couple things.
First, and most important to me, is desert rivers & lakes. Ideally, I would like to remove every lake that is surrounded by desert and disallow any rivers through desert terrain that don't terminate at the ocean. Is there a good way to trace a river backwards or would it be better to modify the flowmap before rivers are even generated?
The next thing I'd like to do is reduce the frequency of large inland seas. I don't want to simply fill them all in with land though. It would be ideal if I could fill some in, force channels out from others and if a channel is created plot out a few small islands inside the sea.
Both of these would help a bit with the overall gameplay in my mod. The deserts are critical since I use them to hold the majority of the key strategic resource (oil, iron and copper) and I only allow desert cities to be built on the coast or tiles with fresh water. The large number of lakes & rivers in the desert makes it too easy to gain access to all of the resources. The inland sea issue is more for strategic importance and to give the AI a helping hand since it doesn't understand that building a massive fleet of warships won't help them if they can't go anywhere.
Also, I don't know if you would want it or not but I added a few simple steps to the tectonics code so the generator has a chance of creating 'typical perfect world' maps, pangea maps (with no land at the poles) or mixed continents. And I added an oceanic divide to the initial heightmap generation to help ensure that there is some ocean separating the landmasses. Of course I kept everything random so you really have no clue what you're getting yourself into since thats the way I like to play.
Anyway, thanks again for the incredible script and the continued updates. I'll keep you posted on the MP issue when I have a chance to test it again.