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Comment by euleriancon | Hacker News Reader

I worked on something very similar for my master's degree.

The problem I could never solve was the speed, and from reading the paper it doesn't seem like they managed to solve that either.

In the end, for my work, and I expect for this work, it is only usable for pre generated terrains and in that case you are up against very mature ecosystems with a lot of tooling to manipulate and control terrain generation.

It'll be interesting to see of the authors follow up this paper with research into even stronger ability to condition and control terrain outputs.

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I came here to say this. My masters was on procedural generation. Perlin, fBm, etc. The things these noise functions have that an LLM doesn’t is speed. 1-D perlin is just a dozen or so multiplications with a couple random coefficients. The GPU can do 4-D Perlin all day long every frame taking up a 4096x4096x32 texture volume.

While I do like the erosion effects and all, having a few height texture brushes that have those features that you can multiply on the GPU is trivial. I still welcome these new approaches but like you said, it’s best for pre generation.

My masters was also on procedural generation. Now I wonder how many of us are out there.

At any rate, given that this paper divides the terrain in regions and apparently seeds each region deterministically, it looks like one could implement a look-ahead that spawns the generation on async compute in Vulkan and lets it cook as the camera flies about.

Which is what a sane terrain system would do. Just beyond the far plane you would load/gen the tile/chunk and as you got closer, increase the resolution/tessalation/etc. (or you start with high and each level away you skip vertices with a wider index march for a lower lod).

In any case, like I said, I welcome any new advances in this area. Overhang being the biggest issue with procedural gen quad terrain. Voxel doesn’t have that issue but then suffers from lack of fine detail.

I think it's catnip for programmers, myself included. (See also: boids, path traced renderers, fluid simulations, old fashioned "generative"/plotter art, etc. - stuff with cool visual output)

Boids is so satisfying!

Boids, Game of Life, Genetic Algorithms, Pixel Shaders...

All so satisfying to play with.

One of my favorites was when I was sure I was right about the Monty Hall problem, so I decided to write a simulator, and my fingers typed the code... and then my brain had to read it, and realize I was wrong. It was hilarious. I knew how to code the solution better than I could reason about it. I didn't even need to run the program.

Now days there are a whole lot of people procedurally generating their masters degrees, but that's a different thing entirely.

lol, this got me good.

I am curious - why would you want to keep generating the same perlin noise every frame? why not pre-generate the terrain?

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