Seven years ago I worked on an terrain generator for a game called Realm of the Mad God. We had started out using Perlin Noise for height maps but found that most of the maps we generated weren't a good fit for the game. I spent the summer trying out ideas for making the maps, and discovered that Voronoi Diagrams could form a good “skeleton” for making maps. The combination of Voronoi polygons and Delaunay triangles gave me places for quests, towns, rivers, and roads. I used Perlin Noise for the coastlines instead of for the height map. The resulting maps were unrealistic and inflexible but they were just what we needed for our game.
I'm a fan of sharing math and algorithms so I wrote up my notes in an article titled Polygonal Map Generation, along with a free online demo written in Flash. The response was amazing! I saw lots of projects trying out Voronoi diagrams for their own map generators, and I also saw lots of people using my Flash version to make maps for things like D&D campaigns, stories, and worldmaking.
A year later I decided I should spend a lot more time making interactive tutorials, so I started Red Blob Games, where I've written interactive tutorials on probability, pathfinding, and hexagons.
It's been seven years since I worked on the map generator. I decided I should spend this summer exploring terrain generation algorithms, revisiting the topics I explored in 2010 and expanding on them. I posted these notes:
- Voronoi alternative - I discovered that my map generator from 2010 wasn't actually using Voronoi! I had been using Voronoi during the summer while working on the generator and also while writing the tutorial, but towards the end I tweaked the polygons to improve the rivers, and in doing so I was no longer using Voronoi.
- Triangle meshes - In 2010 I had used an array-of-structs approach to storing the map data, with an explicit graph structure. It used approximately 2700 bytes per triangle. After watching Gino van den Bergen’s GDC 2017 talk, “B-rep for Triangle Meshes”, I learned about more efficient data structures, and wrote one that uses approximately 27 bytes per triangle. That's a 99% savings! I also learned how to eliminate a common source of errors in my 2010 code: edge cases (literally). By wrapping the map around the "back", I can get rid of all the null pointers in the data structure, and the code became much cleaner.
- Procedural river drainage basins - Part one - I had found a cool paper that described making rivers first and then making mountains to match the needs of the rivers. I wanted to try this out! I spent a week playing with rivers and drainage basins.
- Elevation from rivers - Part two - making the mountains. I ran into some issues that were mentioned in the paper but I wasn't able to come up with a solution within my one week self-imposed deadline.
- Procedural elevation - Part three - still trying to make mountains, I decided to give myself another week. In working on this I realized I've been pursuing all of this because it sounded cool instead of trying to solve the problem I actually had. I stopped pursuing the mountains-from-rivers approach.
- Elevation control - One of the problems I was actually trying to solve is giving the level designer some way to influence the terrain generator. I spent a week playing with some simple algorithms, and found something extremely simple and fast.
- Adding details to sketched terrain - In the previous week I had found something I liked a lot, and I wanted to see if I could hook it up to the mountains-from-rivers algorithms. It was kind of cool but not cool enough that I wanted to pursue it.
- Terrain shader experiments - I took a break from terrain generation to play with shaders. I wanted to see whether shaders could be useful for drawing the boundaries between the Voronoi polygons. Using barycentric coordinates, I got some cool effects, but the only one that was simpler with shaders than without was noisy boundaries.
Having time to experiment was great. I learned a lot. I wrote lots of quick & dirty code, most of which I'll never use again. A few parts of it I want to use for future projects, so I went through those parts and cleaned up the code, ran some automated tests, and then improved the design and usability.
One of the things I've been wanting to do for some time is rewrite the tutorial with interactive diagrams, and reimplement the 2010 map generator from Flash to HTML5. Back then, Flash was a reasonable choice, but not so much today. I spent a few weeks on the tutorial but was unhappy with the way it was going, so I put it on hold. I worked on an HTML5 version of the map generator instead. It doesn't have all the features of the Flash version, but it has some features the Flash version didn't have. It's much faster too.
I'd like to get back to the tutorial, but I think it'll be more compelling once I have some new algorithms to share.
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