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This is an early development image of a spheric map that I'm working on. The idea is that I start off with an icosahedron (3d shape with 20 regular triangles). Each of the triangles I divide into four by adding one vertex on each side of the triangle and pushing the vertex outwards so that it is on same distance from the middle point as the original vertices of the polyhedron (there are 12 vertices in an icosahedron). Then I add or subtract a random value to the new vertex "radius". Then I repeat this procedure recursively on each new triangle. The image above has 20480 triangles (half of them not showing). The random dithering of each new vertex gives a bumpiness to the sphere-like polyhedron that takes form. Actually the structure will be fractal.

So far the bumpiness is minimal, only the colour scheme shows the fractal structure of the "coast lines". I haven't developed a face culling thing yet, which would render the triangles correctly, I only sort them and render them all. You see some errors at 11 o'clock due to bad sorting. I'd like to have a planet with hundreds of thousands of triangles, but there's a lot of sorting and searching in some <list> things that has to be optimized yet.

Items that I want to implement:

[EDIT]
The main idea in this approach is that the result truly is a spheric like map. If you just take a rectangular map and twist it to a sphere, the texture won't be evenly twisted. This spheric polyhedron will have an evenly fractal texture all over the surface.

[TYPOS EDITED]

Looks very sweet!
Adding snow on the pole caps and whisps of cloud would make it almost perfect. By the way Johan, did I ever tell you I've used your random terrain generator a dew times?

This is not a sphere either. It consists of 20*4^n triangles, where n is the number of recursive levels. There's a formula, which I've forgotten. It is about the number of vertices, edges and polygons in a polyhedron. Anyway, it is kind of interesting that the original icosahedron has 12 vertices where five triangles meet. Each new vertex that I add will be a vertex, where six triangles meet. We all know that regular triangles can be tiled to fill a plane. At every corner six triangles meet. The planet in the image has 20480 triangles, none of them is regular, most of them meet six and six at thousands of vertices. But somewhere on the planet you find the original 12 vertices, where only five triangles meet. They enable the roundness of the planet. Of course, some would object to that.

Glad you liked the flat earth map generator
Trezker did some good things to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society

The flat earth society is somewhere far away,
With their candlesticks and compasses
And the bright ship humana is well on it’s way
With grave determination
And no destination, lie, lie, lie...

Anyway, neat work! I can probably use something like this in the near future.

And a rather poor one at that. No one at the time of Columbus had the idea that the Earth was flat, certainly not the Church. Columbus underestimated the size of the Earth, which was apparently not well known despite Aristarchos' measurement.

That being said, I have seen a religous zealot magazine which said things like those on that page and meant them in full earnest. Anyway, the logic is so backward that it'd better be a joke in this case:

This one is funny though:

Where's the downloadable "google earth"-like GUI that Miran is surely making?

A sphere can be divided into 20 identical spherical triangles, meaning each side of each triangle is not a straight line, but an arch on the sphere periphery. If we are thinking of tiles in a game that takes place on the surface of a sphere, 20 is not enough. We need to divide each triangle in smaller triangles. Each triangle divides into 4, as I described above. One could think of doing the same with a hexahedron (a cube), by dividing each face into four squares and push the middle point outwards to the periphery of the sphere, but one would get very twisted squares as tiles. In any case the tiles get twisted unevenly on the sphere.