My girlfriend is awesome.

I made a little shmup prototype

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/413588760/shmup.rar.html 

Arrow keys move the player square, hold A to fire. It's currently very basic and will be expanded upon greatly in the coming weeks.

Overhaul

I completely rewrote the main generation stuff in my map generator to use the diamond-square algorithm rather than more basic two colour fractal noise. It makes much more random, much nicer looking stuff but it's more difficult to control. Height values for each pixel also made adding rivers really easy. Everything could do with some tweaking though, as usual, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the rivers yet. Download it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/408250592/mapgenerator.zip.html

Less boring green!

Better...

But still not right.

Progress report

The program now distinguishes islands from each other, so that I can carry out map generation stuff for each island seperately. The beginnings of a better mountain generation system are in place, with peaks generated at any point further from the coast than the furthest point minus a fraction of the distance of the furthest point. It's nowhere near perfect and still needs a lot of work, but it's a lot better than the previous system.

Quick update

Scrapped the mountain generation stuff I did, working on new stuff now. What I currently have isn't perfect but is definitely better. Still only a work in progress though. *goes to bed*