48
votes
How can bays and straits be determined in a procedurally generated map?
Here's a rough idea using image processing transformations to isolate the features of interest:
Apply a flood fill from an ocean cell to make a mask of all ocean cells. Depending on how your rivers ...
- 139k
42
votes
Procedurally generate regions on island
In the real world, those provincial borders will often be following geological features like rivers.
So maybe a good approach would be to model the geology of the island and have the borders fall out ...
- 3,744
37
votes
What's the difference between 'Dynamic' , 'Random', and 'Procedural' generations?
Disclaimer: If true random exists in our reality, and what is the nature of free will are topics beyond this answer. The random I speak about in this answer is pseudo-random (when I say "random&...
- 28k
32
votes
Continents with Simplex noise
It looks like you're looking for "Turbulence", "Fractional Brownian Motion", or something similar.
This is where we take multiple samples of the noise at different scales - like the different panes ...
- 139k
30
votes
Accepted
How can bays and straits be determined in a procedurally generated map?
The way Dragons Abound identifies bays is to walk along the coastline and find two spots on the coastline where the straight-line distance between the spots is less than the distance along the ...
- 416
29
votes
Procedurally generate regions on island
I would solve this problem with two passes of Voronoi diagrams:
First Pass: Region Partitioning
The first pass would use a somewhat sparse distribution of points (i.e. the distance between the points ...
- 13.2k
27
votes
Accepted
Why is this Procedural Content Generation while that other isn't?
By way of analogy
A circuit does not generate power. A light bulb does not generate power. A battery does not generate power. None of the things which use or store generated power, are power ...
- 30.4k
26
votes
Accepted
Consistent cross platform procedural generation
The best resource I've found on this topic is Bruce Dawson's blog article "Floating-Point Determinism"
It establishes that yes, in theory, you could get cross-platform determinism out of ...
- 139k
24
votes
Accepted
How do Minecraft know where village's buildings are if the village is not generated yet?
Yes, it generates more chunks (or at least more of the village tree) than you think it does. This is what I call "area of interest" in my voxel code. There are two kinds of area of interest:
Logical (...
- 30.4k
18
votes
Accepted
How to report bugs found on procedurally generated levels?
It can also be very useful when your map generation algorithm is deterministic and repeatable based on an initial seed value. So when you enter the same seed value, you get the same map. This might be ...
- 122k
18
votes
Accepted
How to randomly generate biome with perlin noise?
There are three main steps here:
Use some method to assign biomes to regions (this is the hard part, with multiple strategies I'll break down shortly)
For each point in your mesh or tile/node in ...
- 139k
17
votes
How can I fix zig-zagging UV mapping artifacts on a generated mesh that tapers?
Typical UV mapping is what's called an affine transformation. That means the mapping of each triangle between 3D space and texture space can include rotation, translation, scaling/squash, and skew (ie....
- 139k
16
votes
Procedurally generating a building of specific area
A simple way to build a procedural generator is:
Randomly build things
Run a function that checks whether the output is good
If the output is not good, go to step 1
Even if it takes thousands of runs ...
- 14.9k
16
votes
Accepted
How to Instantiate an array of Prefabs in a chequerboard pattern
In the decision on what tile prefab to choose, you can think of it this way:
If (xCoord + yCoord) % 2 == 0, then select prefab1
If (xCoord + yCoord) % 2 != 0, then select prefab2
This ensures the ...
15
votes
Procedural generation of semi-correct planetary systems
Simplify to 2-body physics. N-body physics is in general chaotic and you cannot simulate them to a stable orbit.
Single stars
For systems with a single star, I'd ignore the N-body problem and just ...
- 9,059
13
votes
Accepted
Procedural generation of semi-correct planetary systems
In order to create a plausible solar system, make sure every orbit is within the sphere of influence of the parent body, but not within the hill sphere or roche limit of another body.
The sphere of ...
- 122k
13
votes
Accepted
How can I tile Perlin noise to more accurately represent a world map?
For this particular mapping, I'd stick to 2D Perlin noise.
To recap, 2D Perlin noise works by...
dividing space into square cells, and examining the one cell our sample point falls inside
picking a ...
- 139k
11
votes
How do Minecraft know where village's buildings are if the village is not generated yet?
Technical stuff
During Minecraft's chunk generation a chunk passes several stages before it is done and can be rendered.
These stages, in order, are as follows:
...
- 221
10
votes
Minecraft style world generation
What you are looking for is Fractal Noise generation algorithms, the most popular of which being Perlin noise with successive octave noise generation (in addition to simplex noise, which is patented ...
- 1,793
10
votes
Accepted
Town generation algorithms
Introversion Software made a really impressive city generator for their cancelled indefinitely suspended project Subversion:
The algorithm is designed to generate large, modern metropoles. But the ...
- 122k
10
votes
Continents with Simplex noise
Not with noise alone.
The other answer is correct, you overlay several octaves of noise to get a realistic structure. But you need to bring in physics as well or it won't be a result resembling ...
- 1,323
10
votes
How can I make a solitaire game that can be solved?
Backtracking.
Start with a solved game. Then perform random valid moves in reverse until the game is in the initial state.
This usually works with any puzzle game.
- 122k
9
votes
How can I implement world generation like in Don't Starve?
You can achieve a very similar result by using voronoi diagrams:
You'll need to generate a set of points (one for each biome) with a seeded pseudo random generator (if you want the maps to be ...
- 15.1k
9
votes
How does Terraria generate such large worlds initially?
When the world generates, you'll see various texts appearing while waiting.
These texts aren't random, the world is actually processing what the text says.
I've seen a video that showcases how the ...
- 903
8
votes
Accepted
How can I procedurally find a wall that separates two or more points on a grid-based map?
I will present a general concept and three solutions using that concept.
Concept is an Influence map: For each location in the map, you are going to store a number that represent the distance to each ...
- 28k
8
votes
Accepted
3D terrain generation: geological slices and noise function
(1) Using the same perlin seed (map) as used for terrain
You could treat ranges in the perlin result as different materials.
Thus at a certain threshold, you transition from air / vacuum to matter, ...
- 30.4k
8
votes
How does Terraria generate such large worlds initially?
Couple of additions to Steven's informative answer, at a technical / processing level... speaking here in a general sense of the techniques used to generate large worlds (not Terraria specifically).
...
- 30.4k
7
votes
Accepted
Making dialogue different with each playthrough
There's a great GDC Talk by Elan Ruskin of Valve on what they call "AI-Driven Dialogue through Fuzzy Pattern Matching" or "Rule Databases for Contextual Dialogue and Game Logic" - it's the system that ...
- 139k
7
votes
Procedurally generating a building of specific area
Given a restriction of "all areas are at are at least 3-4 blocks wide" the first idea that leaps to my mind is something like the following:
pick one of 3x3, 3x4, 4x3 or 4x4
place a block of that size ...
- 724
7
votes
Accepted
Procedurally generating a building of specific area
You could use pre-generated polyominoes as meta shapes to build an assortment of buildings.
Let's say your minimum acceptable distance is 3 blocks.
Then the smallest acceptable building unit we'll ...
- 13.2k
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