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.
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.
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. Here is a picture of whats coming:
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:
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.