Comment by tmsbrg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmsbrg | Hacker News Reader

Looks very useful. But it's not really procedural world generation, right? I'd call this geographical data visualisation instead. Generation would be creating new worlds with just a seed and an RNG. Was kind of hoping to see that because that was actually an idea I had for my graduation project. I eventually killed that idea because I just couldn't get a good design of how such a library would work (that would be useful in real games). It's a funny coincidence that I also wanted to make the library with a C++ core and a Unity interface.

Yes, this library does not generate random shaped buildings or terrain regions. Instead, it generates them from real geographical data and allows you specify some noise parameters, e.g. :

canvas|z16 {

    grid-cell-size: 5%; /* affects triangulation*/

    max-area: 0.05%; /* affects triangulation refinement */

    color-noise-freq: 100000; /* color of each vertex will use this noise value */

    ele-noise-freq: 100000; /* height of each vertex will use this noise value*/

    color: gradient(#dcdcdc 0%, #c0c0c0 10%, #a9a9a9 50%, #808080); /* color gradient*/

}

Also, some objects can be randomly generated for specific place, e.g. trees in forest. I found this idea where you have real geodata as input for randomization more interesting than having yet another planet generator with manual setting of various parameters.

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