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Procedural Landscape Generation

Some years ago, the combination of three things came together: The incredible world building of Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy; A series of posts by Introversion software about procedural generation; Being stuck in a hotel room in Karatha with nothing to do but read and think. I had an idea about building procedurally generated worlds, and haphazardly started trying to build it. It didn’t really go anywhere, but someday I’d love to revisit some of the ideas.

Procedural Landscape Generation

Simplifying the Landscape

At the end of the last post [/2010/10/22/now-in-eye-popping-3d] I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I'd generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to test the

Procedural Landscape Generation

Revisiting the Language Issue

Some time ago, I wrote a series [/2010/10/09/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-1-introduction] of [/2010/10/10/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-2-java] posts [/2010/10/11/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-3-c] about [/2010/10/12/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-4-objective-c] language [/2010/10/13/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-5-conclusion] choice for my Clockwork Aphid project. In the end I decided to start the project in Java, this being

Procedural Landscape Generation

Features

So, in my last post [/2011/03/14/brave-new-worlds] I remarked that for procedurally generated landscapes to be interesting, they would need features. But what sort of features was I talking about? Population centres, in particular, tend to to be found close to certain kinds of... things. The first of

Procedural Landscape Generation

Brave New Worlds

If you were writing a taxonomy of stories you might choose books as a good place to start. Flicking your way through the world's libraries, time and the Dewey Decimal System would eventually bring you to the fantasy genre. There is a lot of fantasy writing out there, and you

Procedural Landscape Generation

The Elephant in the Room

Since I haven't been able to do any actual work on my Clockwork Aphid project as of late, I suppose I may as well talk about the background behind it a little more. Those who talk about it the most are the ones doing it the least, and all that.

Procedural Landscape Generation

Fractal Errata

Some of the particularly sharp/anal ones amongst you might have noticed that while the technique for generating fractal lanscapes I previously described [/2010/10/19/youre-speaking-my-landscape-baby] works (and works well), it's not 100% correct. Specifically, the fact that it uses the the same scaling factor for nodes created by

Procedural Landscape Generation

Now In Eye Popping 3D!

It took a little bit of fighting with bugs that weren't showing up in the 2D view, and a bit of time to figure out what was going on with the lighting system in JME [http://www.jmonkeyengine.org/], but I finally got the 3D display of the fractal [/2010/

Procedural Landscape Generation

Some Random Landscapes

I don't have any 3D views of the fractal landscapes I've been making [/2010/10/19/youre-speaking-my-landscape-baby] to show you yet, as I'm still working through the different implementation options. I did get a little distracted with the 2D views of the landscape this morning, though, and play with the

Procedural Landscape Generation

You're Speaking My Landscape, Baby.

No, that isn't a typo... but yes, it is a bad play on words. That's the bad news. The good news: finally! A Clockwork Aphid implementation post! If you're building something which relates in some way to virtual worlds, then the first thing you're going to needis a virtual world.

Procedural Landscape Generation

Language Post Mortem and Some Other Notes

A couple nuggets of knowledge came out of my "You're Speaking My Language, Baby" series of posts, so I though I'd just take a quick moment to talk about them. The first two are perhaps the most obvious by far. Firstly: if you actually write blog posts, people are more

Procedural Landscape Generation

There Can be Only... Several...

As I've previously mentioned, my project (Clockwork Aphid) has been bubbling away in the bearded cauldron that is my head for quite some time. As a result, I have quite a bit I want to say about it. I want to blog about the process of building it because I

Procedural Landscape Generation

You're Speaking my Language, Baby. Part 5: Conclusion

So... what's the conclusion? It mostly comes back to the fact that I'm doing this mainly for fun (though you may have trouble believing it). That being the case I'm going to start working in Java. In fact I already have started working in Java, and I've already written the

Procedural Landscape Generation

Youre Speaking My Language Baby Part 4: Objective C

The last language I'm considering isObjective-C. I know this language the least of three (which is to say: I don't know it at all). To make matters worse, while Java and C++ share a similar syntax, Objective-C is completely different in places. That being said, it's semantically very similar to

Procedural Landscape Generation

You're Speaking my Language, Baby. Part 3: C++

The second language I'm considering isC++. This is the language that I use the most at my day job. It's also the language that's used to build the vast majority of computer games and one hell of a lot of commercial software. I'm not as familiar with it as I

Procedural Landscape Generation

You're Speaking my Language, Baby. Part 2: Java

The first language I'm considering isJava. This is by far the language I'm most comfortable and proficient with. It was used for about 90% of my Bachelors degree, I wrote the entire codebase of my PhD using it, and it gets used here and there in my day job. I'm

Procedural Landscape Generation

You're Speaking my Language, Baby. Part 1: Introduction

If you're about to start on a programming project of some sort (and I am), then the first choice you have to make is the main programming language you're going to use. Now, if you're carrying out this project on your employers time they probably have very specific views about

Procedural Landscape Generation

What in the Name of all that's Holy is a Clockwork Aphid?

Clockwork Aphid is the name I'm giving to a side project I've had sitting at the back of head for a little while. I'm actually going to try and build it now. What it actually is is quite big and hard to explain, so I'm going to do it gradually,