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Bedlam Update 20140311a

More landscape exploration. It’s amazing how quickly I can put to use all the preamble work I did over the summer with perlin generation. I played around with box noise (diamond maps) but honestly the results just weren’t that spectacularly different from what I’m getting now with layered noise.

To which end here, I’m layering perlin noise at a couple of different octave/frequency combinations. The compositing rules are pretty simple because I’m working entirely in grayscale (although Processing does have a habit of throwing in some weird-ass color artifacts from time to time which keeps things interesting.)

After each layer pass I apply a simple convolution matrix to the whole image. These are applied in descending iteration frequency so that the closer to the “top layer” things get, the sharper they are. Pretty simple stuff really but I love the “volcano” accidents. These maps are generated at 1024 so I’d eventually have to serialize these and regenerate higher frequency noise on top of them.

Before I do that though, I have to learn a few new tricks regarding decay and erosion models. There should be cracks, fault lines and rivers in these maps that are missing right now and those are going to be essential for gameplay.

Cheers!