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[shrimp]

Hmmm... I'm not sure whether this should be in the developer/technical section...  Anyway...

Here's a little demo of a terrain generation system, intended for use in RPG/strategy/sim games. I posted a thread ages ago about procedural terrain generation, and this latest attempt is not a dead-end, for a pleasant change!

The terrain renderer is by Alex May (the Dyson one, not that other fella!). It uses Progressive Continuous Adaptive Quadtree LOD Meshing Technology Using Adaptive Quadtrees about which I know very little at the moment. This link might help.
I'm sure Alex will be kind enough to provide more information if anyone wants it.

The generator is modular and works like a set of photoshop filter layers. There are modules for smoothing, fractal landscape, normalising, water erosion, etc. However, the main one in this demo is a patchwork-based thing that tries to make an interesting game-oriented landscape with distinct regions.

Watching the generation process should give a pretty decent idea of how it works, but I'm happy to share the full algorithm.

Known bugs:
- the weird "craters" are a bug, but actually mostly look like fairly convincing volcanoes 
- for some reason it always leaves 2 of the mountain regions blank when making the heightmap
- the 2d map viewer is incredibly slow and crap. Sometimes it seems to not respond to keys, but that's just the framerate. I need to render to texture once it's finished or something.

Next step is probably to add some vegetation, maybe based on a weather model from an earlier generator attempt...

And rivers... But maybe I'll make the game first. Rivers are my arch-nemesis 

Demo app is here: http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/LandscapeTest.rar

Pics:

Example end result:


Patchwork generation display in full flow:

[Alex May]

I'll take my secrets with me to the grave!!!!    :D

[increpare]

noooo make a simple game with it asap.  really.  lots more people will play/comment on it if you dress it up/stick some lipstick on it/&c..

also: what key do I press to go to 3d mode?

[Alex May]

M

it might not be too responsive so just hold it down if it isn't complying!

[increpare]

ah, cheers; the readme file is wrong!

the landscape is appearing unlighted grey for me ( ); makes it hard to appreciate the LOD stuff ;P

[Alex May]

No lights? Weird, it's not doing anything outside like opengl 1.0 or some shit like that.

[increpare]

[Alex May]

Is that resized? Maybe we need to remake the lights after a resize... not done much lighting before

[increpare]

Is that resized? Maybe we need to remake the lights after a resize... not done much lighting before

okay, you got me, it is resized, but it looked the same before resizing also.

[Alex May]

god damn it

Well, it's easy enough to put in a switch for rendering with some hardcoded colours gimme a few hours to get home and i'll set it up

[shrimp]

noooo make a simple game with it asap.  really.  lots more people will play/comment on it if you dress it up/stick some lipstick on it/&c..

Yeah I totally posted this in the wrong forum at this stage! I think I was thinking "technical feedback".

I do have a design written up for a game that should be doable in 1-2 days work, but I need the ability to put objects in the world first. Rivers are definitely on hold though. Forests might be required for the game, but they're pretty trivial to set up.

also: what key do I press to go to 3d mode?

M should work.
Gah... I updated the readme but forgot to update the build archive. Ah well. I think the rest of the keys are right.

[increpare]

if you want me to run any debug builds/&c., just lemme know.

[Bezzy]

When I get round to doing k2, this'll totally be what i use for planet terrain

[increpare]

oh, one comment about the terrain generation: it's awfully flat, isn't it?  I think working on some sexier, more vertically-interesting, features might be cool (canyons, volcanoes, &c.)...