Elevation Control | Hacker News Reader

Elevation Control

redblobgames.com

231 pointsdougb516 comments

I see blog posts from redblobgames posted sometimes and I really like how in-depth the explanations are. I remember reading about 2d height maps and map generation for a side project I was working on a while back and the explanations he gave for why he was using a particular algorithm were fantastic (in addition to the interactive demos):

http://www.redblobgames.com/maps/terrain-from-noise/

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

Totally agree. It was years ago when I found their blog post about hexagonal grid generation and it was the most informative one I had seen anywhere. Still is today. Plus the interactive parts give the sections so much more meaning.

I often find myself reading posts on their site just for the heck of it.

Unless it's modeling islands, I find most terrain generators unnatural, at least from above. I wonder how feasible (and realistic looking) it would be to build a terrain generator using a bunch of fluid simulation to model plate tectonics, weather, and erosion.

Look into Dwarf Fortress. The world generation is incredibly complex and realistic. The community-driven wiki is helpful as always[1]. Not only is the physical world generation impressive, the generated history and lore is amazing as well.

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Advanced_world...

I wonder if this game would be more compelling if they wrote a renderer that wasn't limited to the resolution of a text font?

I'm sure the current DF fanbase isn't interested and might even be repelled. But I also think it might open it up to a new audience that otherwise hasn't/wouldn't consider it.

Have you heard of Armok Vision? It's a 3D visualizer being developed by modders so that you can view your fortress in 3D (I think even in real-time).[1]

[1]https://github.com/JapaMala/armok-vision

F. Kenton Musgrave has done work on that, starting with this paper in 1989 [1]. Here is a more recent paper which references his work (among many others) [2]. Also [3].

[1] The synthesis and rendering of eroded fractal terrains

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=74337

[2] Terrain generation using procedural models based on hydrology

http://arches.liris.cnrs.fr/publications/articles/SIGGRAPH20...

[3] Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3028601

You may find World Machine interesting: http://www.world-machine.com/about.php?page=features

Just tectonics:

- http://davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/blog/

- https://sourceforge.net/projects/platec/

Tectonics with simulated weather:

- http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generati...

Just fluid dynamics:

- http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html

I absolutely love this one:

> http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generati...

I've looked heavily into implementing this. It would take some years, even with a team.

What about /u/diggernet's examples? Depending on the scale you need, it seems like you can get pretty far with just Javascript in the browser.

There are factors in games that mean something 'real' probably wouldn't result in a great map. Foremost is the fact the real world doesn't care whether or not there are places where a person can get stuck. A game world has be be designed in a way that means the player can't get stuck in places they can go to, and can't go in to places where they could get stuck. Depending on the game type, the map also often acts as a 'corridor' forcing the player to move through a series of locations in order. Features like that move a game map away from something real really fast.

Unnatural may not be the most accurate term here. It might not be Earth like. But whose to say many terrain generators are completely possible in the real world, in the countless Planets we've yet to see the topography of.

I had kind of the inverse idea some time (years) back -- generating polygonal contour maps, and heightmaps out of them. See the demo here: http://akx.github.io/islands/

Terrain generation is usually fractal, and you can start from a plane, or a hand-created surface and let the fractal algorithm fill in detail. That's old. The cool new thing was seen in Moana, where the water surface generation allowed animator control with the water being a character.

That created an uncanny valley problem. When the water "goes character", it looks a bit strange, because it suddenly stops obeying physical laws. That's OK for a Disney princess story, but used with high rendering realism it looks wrong.

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