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Fred Rookstown · 10-07-2009, 04:36 PM

Been playing around with a prototype of a procedural terrain generator, which can generate all kinds of terrain on the fly and apply specific modifications to it.

Note: These are all false-color heightmaps generated with code from OpenSim, and heights have been scaled from [0,256] to [0,45] for some level of realism.

Ridged Perlin Noise (for mountains/mountainous islands):

Hills Algorithm (for hill-based terrain):

Craters

Used to generate terrain (following was 250 randomly placed craters):

Used to add drama to existing terrain: (two craters manually added):

Erosion

Themal, hydraulic, and midpoint erosion are all supported.

Licensing

The terrain generation libraries themselves will be part of a GPL module for OpenSim. They will also be available to Second Life users in the form of a L$100 commandline client.

**Adam Zaius** · 10-08-2009, 02:32 AM

Very cool - any chance of synchronising the license with the OpenSim main one (OpenSim is BSDL); I could probably push some of those features into the upstream main terrain module if that was the case.

Fred Rookstown · 10-08-2009, 02:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Zaius

Very cool - any chance of synchronising the license with the OpenSim main one (OpenSim is BSDL); I could probably push some of those features into the upstream main terrain module if that was the case.

The license from which I obtained the original Java libraries was GPL; Since it's a port to C#, I'm pretty sure I can't sync the license. I'm no lawyer, either.

I'm still tweaking parameters for the craters and I get weird float errors on C# that I don't get elsewhere.

Lordfly Digeridoo · 10-08-2009, 09:16 AM

Very cool. I've always found it more challenging and fun to design within the constraints of the terrain rather than making an "ideal" setting.

Fred Rookstown · 10-08-2009, 03:31 PM

Well, the land that is generated isn't quite ideal; It sometimes takes several tries to generate hilly terrain the provides both an interesting underwater landscape in addition to habitable islands. Occasionally, when adding cliffs, the cliffs added can be way too high and cause artifacting. The hydraulic erosion also tends to remove too many features.

However, since one can specify the size of the map generated, you could, for example, terraform an entire grid continent in one go. I'm planning on making a utility that can split a larger map into smaller chunks using standard grid coordinates. However, I first need to figure out why hills occasionally generate ranges like [-3.1...,3.1...] instead of the required [0,1] ranges...

10-07-2009, 04:36 PM	#1 (permalink)
Fred Rookstown Senior Member I see what you did there. Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Internets Posts: 114 SL Join Date: 3/16/2009 Business: Red Fedora Productions	Automatically Generated Terrain + Map Been playing around with a prototype of a procedural terrain generator, which can generate all kinds of terrain on the fly and apply specific modifications to it. Note: These are all false-color heightmaps generated with code from OpenSim, and heights have been scaled from [0,256] to [0,45] for some level of realism. Ridged Perlin Noise (for mountains/mountainous islands): Hills Algorithm (for hill-based terrain): Craters Used to generate terrain (following was 250 randomly placed craters): Used to add drama to existing terrain: (two craters manually added): Erosion Themal, hydraulic, and midpoint erosion are all supported. Licensing The terrain generation libraries themselves will be part of a GPL module for OpenSim. They will also be available to Second Life users in the form of a L$100 commandline client.

10-08-2009, 09:16 AM	#4 (permalink)
Lordfly Digeridoo Grid.Living Buy my prefabs! Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Michigan Posts: 2,321 My Mood: SLShopper Ads: 5 SL Join Date: 7/21/2003 Business: Grid.Living XBOX Leaderboard: 18^th Awards: 1	Very cool. I've always found it more challenging and fun to design within the constraints of the terrain rather than making an "ideal" setting. __________________ http://www.lordfly.com/

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10-08-2009, 03:31 PM	#5 (permalink)
Fred Rookstown Senior Member I see what you did there. Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Internets Posts: 114 SL Join Date: 3/16/2009 Business: Red Fedora Productions	Well, the land that is generated isn't quite ideal; It sometimes takes several tries to generate hilly terrain the provides both an interesting underwater landscape in addition to habitable islands. Occasionally, when adding cliffs, the cliffs added can be way too high and cause artifacting. The hydraulic erosion also tends to remove too many features. However, since one can specify the size of the map generated, you could, for example, terraform an entire grid continent in one go. I'm planning on making a utility that can split a larger map into smaller chunks using standard grid coordinates. However, I first need to figure out why hills occasionally generate ranges like [-3.1...,3.1...] instead of the required [0,1] ranges...

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