Procedural RPG OT: every action has consequences

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Started by Legend, Apr 20, 2019, 09:02 PM

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Legend



More or less here is the finished result for the coasts. I am really surprised just how well this turned out considering my method was a shot in the dark. Using the same random numbers, here is the result if just one continent is used.



Then 2 continents.


Then 3.


Original 4.


Then 5.


Then 6.


Then 7.


Then 8.


The shapes of each continent are completely altered as additional land masses affect the procedural generation, but you can still see that they kinda stick to the same locations (colors are random).

My approach is to place "seeds" that then expand and grow out into the world. Every seed leads to its own continent, although the seeds commonly end up impacting each other. To demonstrate what types of shapes this approach produces, here are worlds with a single seed/continent placed in the exact center. Nothing is changed except the random numbers used behind the scenes.















Here are more examples of worlds with multiple seeds/continents.












All of these samples were random and show both the good and bad of this approach. The method works by randomly picking ~100 locations to be sampling points. It then goes through every continent and picks a random point on that continent to expand from. The closest sampling point is then transitioned to that continent if it is close enough. This is repeated hundreds of times. Then ~10,000 new locations are randomly sampled and the process repeats. This time the points need to be even closer to be transitioned to the continent. This whole thing is repeated over and over and over again with exponentially more sampling points until the image has enough detail. Here are the results at each sampling stage.
















The big negative is all the holes/lakes inside of land masses. I can improve this by changing how I convert the vector points to an image but I think I'll mostly rely on just using a "paint bucket" image effect to mostly make the land solid. The coastlines are the parts that I'm really interested in. I also plan to do additional processing to smooth some of the coasts and add mountains, major rivers, and island chains. The images above are a billion times better than perlin noise but there is still a lot I can do to improve them. Here is a photoshopped example of the land with most of the lakes removed.