Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tmsbrg 3620 days ago
Looks very useful. But it's not really procedural world generation, right? I'd call this geographical data visualisation instead. Generation would be creating new worlds with just a seed and an RNG. Was kind of hoping to see that because that was actually an idea I had for my graduation project. I eventually killed that idea because I just couldn't get a good design of how such a library would work (that would be useful in real games). It's a funny coincidence that I also wanted to make the library with a C++ core and a Unity interface.
1 comments

Yes, this library does not generate random shaped buildings or terrain regions. Instead, it generates them from real geographical data and allows you specify some noise parameters, e.g. :

canvas|z16 {

    grid-cell-size: 5%; /* affects triangulation*/

    max-area: 0.05%; /* affects triangulation refinement */

    color-noise-freq: 100000; /* color of each vertex will use this noise value */

    ele-noise-freq: 100000; /* height of each vertex will use this noise value*/

    color: gradient(#dcdcdc 0%, #c0c0c0 10%, #a9a9a9 50%, #808080); /* color gradient*/
}

Also, some objects can be randomly generated for specific place, e.g. trees in forest. I found this idea where you have real geodata as input for randomization more interesting than having yet another planet generator with manual setting of various parameters.