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URI Procedural Island Generation (III)
mclau157 wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
URI [1]: https://github.com/bsubard/Godot-3D-Infinite-Procedural-Terrai...
rendaw wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
Okay I've seen a ton of procedural earth generation blog posts. Random
bisections, noise, fractals, erosion, watersheds, biomes and climate
derivation, etc etc.
Why did the author of this one choose this approach rather than some
other approach? What issues did they see with others that they decided
to write their own? What's unique here?
Or maybe: What's the ultimate procedural earth generation technique? Is
there anyone following these and comparing them?
dvt wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
> Why did the author of this one choose this approach rather than
some other approach? What issues did they see with others that they
decided to write their own? What's unique here?
I'm not sure what you mean here. A lot (most?) procedural systems use
Voronoi methods for procedural terrain generation, so this isn't some
wholly novel solution. From what I can tell (haven't looked into it
super deeply), it looks like Lloyd's algorithm is basically a
variation of random bisections.
kelseyfrog wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Procedural generation's history mirrors that of symbolic AI - hand
tuned, interpretable procedures that parallel the conceptual models
we have of a generating process.
The choices the author made reflect the way they conceptualize the
generating process. This is in contrast to a data-informed approach.
A data-informed approach to island generation would be a spatially
auto-correlated generating model whose parameters were derived from
real life data on islands. You would then be able to generate more
in-distribution islands that were statistically similar to islands in
the corpus.
You don't often see this in the proc-gen world because part of the
fun is adding epicycles and various tunable knobs.
deadbabe wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Iâm tired of terrain generation techniques that just involves noise.
People should really try to step up and make landforms that are modeled
after tectonic activity and create biomes based on weather patterns and
ocean current. The end result will be far more natural and realistic.
dylan604 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
> The end result will be far more natural and realistic.
or infuriating because some small detail is not right causing all of
the biomes to die off.
panzagl wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
In Dwarf Fortress that's called !!fun!!
nla wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
It's a completely different approach but checkout F. Kenton Musgrave's
implementation of multi fractals for terrain generation.
"Texturing & Modeling: A Procedural Approach"
skywal_l wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
As a complement, a nice (and funny) videos about fractal terrain
generation:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsJHzBTPG0Y
danielvaughn wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
I'd like to ask a naive question, as I'm not really familiar with
procedural terrain generation but I've been curious about it from afar.
From what I can tell, most work in this area revolves around
manipulating geometric patterns to "look like"
mountains/islands/whatever.
Is there any value in modeling geological processes instead? So if you
take a flat plane, along with a model of geological forces that could
alter that plane, and run some kind of simulation over time (in effect
simulating erosion etc), could that not produce a more "realistic"
terrain?
I assume it's much more complex, much more computationally expensive,
and all that. But I'd be surprised if no one at all has attempted this.
softfalcon wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
The extremely accurate and high end terrain generation tools do
exactly this. They model different terrain densities, erode-ability,
and permeability to then apply rain, snow, tectonic shifts, river
erosion, thaw-melt, etc over virtualized eons.
The result is incredibly detailed terrain that is completely unique
based on the initial parameters and the randomness of the
time-elapsed process that is non-deterministic.
The only downside is that it takes hours to simulate and that's more
than most folks are interested in investing in.
Here are some examples of this kind of software:
World machine: [1] Terragen: [2] Vue: [3] Gaia:
URI [1]: https://www.world-machine.com/
URI [2]: https://planetside.co.uk/
URI [3]: https://www.bentley.com/software/e-on-software-free-download...
URI [4]: https://www.procedural-worlds.com/products/indie/gaia/
jauntywundrkind wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
You might be interested in this read from the procedural generation
wiki: teleological vs ontogenic. This style here is ontogenic,
teleological involves simulating more of the processes. [1] It'd be
neat to see a game world where the simulation remains ongoing, where
the world is actively changing.
URI [1]: http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-algorithm:teleological-vs-ontogen...
o11c wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
Well, the article does mention that Part IV adds erosion. Note also
that this particular source is a rare example of working based on a
mesh rather than a grid (which complicates the logic - in particular,
when do you split/merge nodes? - but should be cheaper at scale).
People can try something fully physics-based (or rather,
physics-inspired) even for earlier stages, but there are problems:
* You still need some kind of nondeterministic input so you don't
always generate the same world.
* You must do the whole world at once, rather than being able to
generate each area independently.
* This requires the computation to run for a long time, and needs to
feed back in on itself (think of "lake overflows a natural dam and
carves a valley, then the tectonics lift it and change the low point
anyway").
* It's very easy for your code to result in "boring" outputs, such as
"all flat" or "infinitely deep valleys".
wiz21c wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
URI [1]: https://planetside.co.uk/
Datagenerator wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
The amazing science based map for minetest comes to mind:
URI [1]: https://github.com/DokimiCU/mg_tectonic
ramses0 wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
There's been a fair number of previous posts which cover that topic:
[1] This one is a particularly useful starting point:
URI [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com+procedu...
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196154
swiftcoder wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
Very nice writeup. I like the process of adding random noise to the
distances on the graph when deriving the mountains
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