Mapgen4: elevation #

Last week I posted about mapgen4, the procedural map generation project I'm working on this summer. I had been trying to limit the scope of the project, and also shifting my thinking from maps for a game to maps that look pretty. I've been spending a lot of time optimizing and restructuring the code for this. It occurred to me that I'm approaching elevation all wrong.

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Mapgen4: goals #

I've been posting on Twitter but was reminded that I should be posting more to my blog. I don't want Twitter to be the only place to read about what I'm doing.

Screenshot of a procedurally generated map

Back in 2010 I had written an influential article about map generation, making maps specifically designed for one game. I made a Flash demo called mapgen2. At the time I didn't emphasize enough how each of the layers of the process could be different. Many people took the recipe as the way to do it, even though the recipe was specifically for the needs of that one game. In mapgen2 the rivers depended on elevation which depended on coastlines. But it could've been coastlines depended on elevation which depended on rivers. There are lots of different ways to glue the pieces together. In 2017, I wanted to go back and try a different recipe with the same ingredients (Voronoi, elevation, rivers, biomes, etc.). For a while I thought the new project, mapgen4, will do all the things! I experimented with lots of things but the task seemed overwhelming. I decided to step back and limit my scope. I rebuilt the same algorithms with the new framework (HTML5, and more efficient data structures), and launched that as an HTML5 version of mapgen2. Then I put everything on hold.

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Delaunator guide #

I decided that I should work on a new tutorial this summer. What better than to take all the map experiments I worked on last summer, and turn them into a procedural voronoi-map generation tutorial? As I worked on the outline and some of the initial diagrams I realized this was going to be big: poisson disc, delaunay, voronoi, elevation, climate, biomes, oceans, rivers, towns, roads, natural resourcess, and so much more. And starting with something big often leads to failure. So I needed something smaller.

I decided that I should start with just the structural part: Delaunay and Voronoi, and how they can be used for game maps: poisson disc, jitted grid, delaunay, voronoi, graph properties, neighbors, traversal, lookups, iterators, ghost elements, centroid vs incenter vs circumcenter, rounded regions, subdivision, and more. While working on the outline for this I realized again that it was going to be big. And starting with something big often leads to failure. So I needed something even smaller.

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