Procedural Island Generation

Great post!

A few months ago, my partner and I finished a 6 month long project over the course of our final year of Game Programming. We developed an island survival game made for Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra. I did the island and environment generation including animal AI for finding the player while avoiding any of the 40 000 trees that may be in the way.

I used most of the techniques in the post except for the moisture map. I actually ended up generating rivers by accident (which turned out great) just by rearranging the order of masks that I applied to the height map. I used around 4 masks I believe to get the island to be the way I wanted. Unity took care of the rendering, I just applied my height map to the terrain.

I'm planning on writing a post soon about my experiences, but here's a video of the final version for now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTYT3fU-Cek

I see a distinct problem with the terrain model. It seems to build the physical shape then apply a waterline to define the islands. That makes the above-water island a simple extension of the below-ground terrain. Earth, and I think is safe to assume any planet with water, is more complex.

Before getting to vegetation and biomes, why not some modeling of increased weathering above sealevel? Unless every island is tropical and volcanic, those mountains should be flatten out significantly in comparison to the terrain below sealevel. The deep valleys should fill with gravel.

Another great guide for procedural terrain generation:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...