Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 8:30 am
Ooooooh. That is
nice -- seeing these immediately makes me want to get down in there and start exploring.
Some quick (and maybe inaccurate) thoughts:
1. Do you use a "biome" concept? I see what look like broadleaf (deciduous) and conifers mixed together, which feels a little off (at least from a "how Earth works" perspective).
2. The road generation looks
really nice.
3. Water edges might need some more variation -- hard to tell from just this one example, though.
4. I can see seams in the red "Western" terrain. Is there any kind of smoothing function?
5. Needs more rednecks.
A little disclaimer about what the world generator is doing, and what not:
It generates the landscape (terrain elevation, terrain details), what "biome" is used (here desert, forest, snow) , where the buildings are, where the lakes are, and the road.
The details on the map, such as what trees, stones and grass are generated, is up to the games ingame procedural generator. I could write all that, but its out of the my control in the end.
The biomes (i think Minecraft started that naming in gaming) are set in the games presets. I know that the details are not geologically nor geographically correct, such as the desert (like in Arizona) being on the same area as snow covered Alpine mountains. But there is a balance here between gameplay and immersion in a realistic environment. (There are specific resources in each biome that need to be accessible).
The game unfortunately only supports 16 bit hightmaps, wich are mapped to 0 to 256 meters. So Mountains are out of scale by about 1:10...
The transition between desert and "forest"/greenland could be smoother, but dithering the biomes textures would also look quite artificial. A limitation on the games side.
The roads are calculate by a custom path search, similar to Dijkstra. They account for the terrains elevation change, and connect the major cities in the game.
I wrote that quite swiftly, so its not very optimized. An A* version exists, but i could not figure out some bugs in it, making it not perform faster than the included pathfinding.
There is an adaptive smoothing, wich smoothes out small elevation changes, but keep steeper terrain more rough. Overall is looks better than having everything smoothed out.
Water is quite nitpicky in the game. Making the whole world flood if its spawned "over the edge". Unfortunately also a limitation of the game-engine.
Overall, its fun to write a tool that creates new worlds for people to play in... Especially having the option to generate you own personal world, that noone else saw before.
Here some more impressions:
