In a previous post I teased about a tiny experiment I did recently. It revolves around something call chaotic systems, which are systems whose development is heavily influenced by the initial conditions. Conway’s Game of Life, for instance. In my case, is something simpler, but with some random mechanisms that make it interesting. Leaving all the implementation details aside, the basic system works like this (bear with me, pictures come later…): At the beginning of time we have a single cell.
When I first discovered Unity, I got thrilled by the super intuitive API and the cool ways they exploit C# features. I totally love design patterns, well designed APIs, and clever use of language constructs to achieve coding powerful and complex behaviors with expressive but simple statements. Unity has much of that, and I fell completely in love when I discovered their neat approach to co-routines. However, there was one part of the API that got me very disappointed from day one: the Invoke method.
I just changed my blog platform again, this time to Hugo. Yes, I know… but there is a very good reason, besides me having an OCD about trying out every new software out here. But to explain that, I have to start over… I started blogging around 5 years ago, and as every newbie out there, I started with Wordpress. Being trained in the profane arts of computer science, I decided I should have a personal server, with my own installation of Wordpress and all.
This post is mostly about adding some details to the terrain in the form of props (rocks and trees). We are not gonna spent any time actually designing or generating nicely looking rocks and trees. We are just gonna put some dumb cylinders and spheres with a bit of color. Instead, we are going to concentrate on making the generation of the props efficient. In a later post we’ll deal with actually generating nicer looking rocks and trees.
In the previous post we made some good advance on the first (and most important) of the three components for a procedural terrain generator. We’ll get back to that later on, but for now, I want to focus on the second most important component: the mesh generator. Lets recap where we are now: So, whats wrong with this island? Mainly, two things: It looks too smooth. It has too little detail.
This is the first post in what will be (I hope) a long series on procedural content generation. For the first part of the series, I will focus on what I think is the best content to begin with, procedural terrain. I choose terrain because there are a number of fairly straightforward algorithms that generate pretty good looking terrains, and are not that hard to understand or implement. To warm things up, this is a quick look at what I’ll be showing in the next few posts.
