The only problems I am seeing here with my new idea is A) caves will have that general circular if not jelly bean shape.always B) Biomes will always be square, perhaps not noticeable while you are playing, but if you use Terraria's map viewer you can see their biomes are NOT square shaped. Sound like I am heading the right direction or? Right now we are using only Perlin noise to generate terrain, caves, patches, ores, etc. And then of course also have our patches of ores gems.Īnyways, its a book I just wrote there but that is what it is doing right now, and what I am thinking at this moment. We could do the same for patches of terrain (i.e patches of dirt in a primarily stone based biome). Maybe I have 3 cave methods for that particular biome: GenForestCave1, GenForestCave2, GenForestCave3, all with different values being passed to those methods and the perlin noise. On top of that, rather than have 1 method that generates small caves, and another that generates large ones, with a method that generates patches, why not have numerous methods doing this? For example perhaps I am currently building blocks in a Forest biome chunk. Now I am kind of thinking of re-iterating through the chunks after they are created and running biome specific algorithms functions for the blocks that chunk will contain. But blocks were being generated separately from the chunks. We were thinking at first we could create all these different noise ranges and if a block fell within that noise range then it would be this type of terrain block.
STARBOUND MAP VIEWER HOW TO
If the chunk is already loaded and the player is out of range, it destroys its mesh.ĭuring map generation I think we were thinking a bit narrowly about how to do it. If they are within 128 blocks, then the chunk gets its block data from the map and builds its mesh. When the game begins, the chunks check every 1 second what their distance in blocks is from the player. Forest, Mountain, SkyIsland, etc.) Then we go through and instantiate the map and other necessary data. Each layer has several biomes associated with it that are randomly selected (i.e. There are 5 height layers right now (Sky, Surface, Underground, Cavern, and Core). In our map creation right now, we iterate through the map chunkswide x chunkshigh, instantiating each chunk and assigning a biome to it based on its height in the world.
STARBOUND MAP VIEWER MANUAL
Like houses that look like houses, I imagine for these we can just create a manual 2D block array that gives us the desired effect and then just put it in when our noise perhaps pings a certain value? Any help with the above mentioned questions is greatly appreciated, thanks all! Also one final question, based on what I have seen in other-similar games, some things I don't even think are possible. What we could do to perhaps even achieve the above mentioned effects. What we can do to gain more control over the noise. Is anybody able to give us some pointers about the algorithms, such as what types of noise should be used as what. We just don't have that kind of control over the noise. Like shaping for example, if you ever played Terraria you have the Corruption Biome and Jungle Biomes with these large caverns that go down deep from the surface layer down, and in the Corruption Biome you have a horizontal cave that runs the length of the biome itself. We seem to have very little control over our noise minus the items we can do that I mentioned above. I want to see arms snaking out of caves leading every which way. I would love to see a less smooth landscape and caves, and something just a touch more rugged. We have just begun to experiment with Simplex Noise and Fractal Noise as well. We can do all of this just using plain old Perlin noise. We can create the terrain contour just fine, we can create patches of whatever, ores, dirt, stone, caves, etc. and it seems that while many are willing to give you a headstart into the process of terrain generation, the creation of beautiful 2D terrain itself is a closely guarded secret. We have paged through countless articles, forum posts, google searches, etc. Everything is going well except for one thing, the terrain generation itself. We have the procedural mesh generation down, breaking blocks, placing blocks, etc, etc. Our team is currently in the process of making a 2D procedurally generated game similar to that of Starbound and Terraria.