Update 11: World Generation Refactor

I’ve spent some time refactoring the world generation and building a useful world generation editor. I think having an actual visual interface to preview the generation in real time will be massively useful. Before, I would make changes to the algorithm in c++, then have to wait while it compiles and launches to see the changes. This is obviously painfully slow and make makes it very difficult to experiment. Now I can manipulate noise parameters in a custom editor and see the changes right away.

Noise

Before, all I could do with noise was stack them on top of each other with a blending function (Add, Subtract, Avg, Multiply..). However to get more exciting results the noise parameters need to be deviated by another noise value. So for example, now I can plug ‘Billow’ noise into the frequency parameter of an ‘FBM ‘noise. This kind of perturbation can get really interesting results.

Biomes

In all but the first post I ever made on the game you can’t see any biomes on the map. I actually disabled biomes because of a bug in the code. I’ve gone and fixed the bug and tweaked the whole biome generation system. I also wrote a script which takes the current world generation parameters and outputs one large image containg lots of maps using different seeds.

These maps above are using the old noise system. The mountains are just kind of splatted on top of the base noise. Next step will be to play around with the new noise system to create more natural looking mountains which blend into the terrain.