Sep 4 2012

Making Mountains

GrenadeMagnet

In the spirit of actually getting to gameplay and making it look good (not necessarily in that order), I put together a spline-based mountain/volcano generator.  The first results were encouraging but rather sterile:

Initial results for spline based terrain feature creation.

First attempt. Recognizable but too smooth.

In order to make it look a bit more natural, I added a couple of sets of simplex noise based offsets to the spline data.  Looking better:

More variation but still not a good looking play-scape.

Added some noise. Looks more like what I’m after but needs adjustment.

I considered adjusting the spline interpolation itself using another set of 1-d noise to be applied according to the angle from a reference angle to make it a bit less circular.  I may still do that in the future but I was able to get a proto-typable level just by adjusting the spline control points:

Add noise, adjust the "beach" area of the spline a bit, and voila!

Expanding the distance between the mountain base and shoreline made a lot of difference.

Next up is getting a smooth surface fitted to the data for both the mountain generator and the previous abstract terrain generator.  Then comes feature (forest, cave, resource) generation followed by a better camera with collision detection.

 


Jun 25 2012

I Seem to Have Gotten Distracted…

GrenadeMagnet

I set aside the tile-slider game for a little bit so I could get a fresh look at it and started tinkering around with Minecraft-esque terrain generation. Pretty primitive right now. It’s enough to validate geometry generation and to start looking at performance.

Textures are a stand-in from the Spahx PureBDCraft texture pack (http://bdcraft.net) until I get my own put together.  For now I’m using the Ogre3D TutorialApplication framework.  That’ll probably change as I move to allow a lot of the work to be done on the GPU via DX11 compute shader and/or OpenCL.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I’m thinking a cross of Castles II and DwarfFortress right now…