Awesome Procedural Terrain Generation | Hacker News Reader

Awesome Procedural Terrain Generation

shamusyoung.com

25 pointsbuggy_code10 comments

Check out 'Elevated' - winner of the 4k PC demo category at Breakpoint 2009. It's a fly-through of a realistic looking procedurally generated terrain model with music and some fancy post processing effects all squeezed into a <4096 bytes executable. Even my moderately high-end PC can't run it (I suspect because it shoves an overwhelmingly huge triangle mesh at the GPU) but there's a video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE

oh RGBA, I was expecting someone would post elevated in a thread like this. Here is a homepage from IQ from RGBA http://iquilezles.org/www/ - lots of useful stuff here. He is working, I believe, on Infinity engine (not bioware one) which will, hopefully, yield a game like EVE/Elite one day. Here is a devlog: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=c...

IQ posts some comments about the implementation of Elevated in this thread on gamedev.net also:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=5...

Also also: the readme that comes with the download is missing the '.tech' section available here: http://pouet.net/nfo.php?which=52938

excellent find, thanks!

I thought the title meant the Reddit team was working on procedural terrain generation. There's usually no need to cite where a submission was found.

The article is mostly about rendering terrain, not generating it, and it also has nothing to do with reddit.

However, the rendered results do look relatively nice, and the article (even as awfully paginated as it is) gives a pretty good idea on how to get there from zero.

With all due respect, this is not awesome. Nowhere near it.

But this - http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen - is.

The awesomeness lies in the explanations and reasons, not the intrinsic tech.

This guy is currently doing a series on procedural generation of a city terrain, and it's the same deal. It's not going to win awards for "teh aw3som3st cty evar!", it's that you don't often see someone do something like this while posting reasons, dead-end experiments, and other such commentary.

It's less awesome to look at, but radically superior as an article to read and learn from.

The articles are more about building a 3D engine than generating terrain, but still a good read.

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