Making Mountains
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:
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:
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:
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.