Terrain Generation: Update

Well, I spent a good portion of the last few days working on the terrain generation system and I'm VERY pleased with the results I'm getting now. As is usually the case, what I had thought was a good idea turned out pretty crappy. The perlin noise idea I mentioned in the last post was very difficult to tune to produce interesting results. The image below is pretty much the best I could come up with that didn't look ridiculous:

Image1 "Improved" terrain generation. Note height-based tile selection.

The terrain was taking something like 25 seconds to generate, and looked pretty crappy which wasn't ideal. Around this point I decided to try something crazy, and I was blown away when it immediately produced much better results:

Image2. Crazy idea pays off.

I played around with the code alot at this point, stripping out entire sections, rewriting existing routines, adding totally new stuff and testing lots of new ideas and settings. I spent a good half a day optimising some of the really big number crunching routines and I managed to speed up one of the core routines I was using extensively by a factor of 3, which reduced the terrain generation time to a much nicer 10 or so seconds.

I then spent some time improving the tile selection code to place the different terrain tiles in a smoother fashion. Though I quite liked the "dirty" look of the terrain from a distance, if you zoomed in it looked odd, with tiles appearing to be scattered randomly amongst each other. This was due to the fact that the tile selection was based mostly on the slope of the terrain at that point. The new system uses layers of value noise where each tile type fights it out against the others and the winner is selected. Due to the smooth nature of the value noise function, you get larger regions of the same tile type and there is less oscillation between the different types.

I eventually added 3 additional tile types, a darker version of the grass texture, a rock texture and a pinker sand texture that represents sand dunes. The image below represents the current state of the terrain generator:

Image3. Latest version of the terrain generator.

There's still a fair bit to do, like doing rainfall calculations to generate rivers and lakes, but as I said at the beginning of the post, I'm VERY pleased with the results and wanted to share a better looking screenshot.