FYI - Procedural World Developer - Interview

Skaldarnar

Development Lead
Contributor
Art
World
SpecOps
For all of you that are interested in procedural generation and stuff, there will be an interview with Miguel Cepero (Procedural World Blog, VoxelFarm) on Sunday, Februaray 3rd on AIGameDev.com.
 

Skaldarnar

Development Lead
Contributor
Art
World
SpecOps
Okay, here are my messy notes on the interview. Maybe they are interesting for some of you. I tried to provide some useful links where I could find them ;)

His blog: http://procworld.blogspot.com/
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Voxels/Polygons
- Dual Contouring
-> Voxel to Polygons

Terrain
-not much noise funcitons like Perlin (overused!).
- Heightmap (Perlin)
-> apply naturla filter (Erosion)
-> 3d noise for local detail (e.g. worley noise)
- texture splatting -> material information

- Hugues Hoppe's "Parallel controllable texture synthesis" for terrain?

Frankesterrain
-> Stitching terrain samples together
-> noise + pre-generated (use samples from simulations)
-> erosion/decay baked into sample data
-> Wang Tiles (blogpost)

Terrain Details
- little stones instead of grass in deserts/caves
- material based placement
- set of rules to determine tree/building placement

Trees/Forests
-> Cellular Automata (Calgary university - botany) for forests

Individual Trees
-> Space colonization (goal driven)
-> L-System do not understand what they are representing (out of control)

Caves
-> challenging/expensive
-> occlusion test (what is hidden)
-> generate dungeon system
-> corridors/rooms (disturbed lines)
-> but where to put a cave?

Buildings
-> exterior/facade
-> outside is quite simple
-> CityEngine
-> polygonal meshes as output
-> turn back to voxels

Biomes
-> Repetive Textures
-> Wang Tiles

Water
1. What is ocean, what is land
2. Wind directions to determine humidity
-> Wind simulation
3. River (place source in moutains, trace way to the ocean)

Tiles
-> Process tiles in isolation
-> Use tiles for biomes/sections/areas

Issues/Plans
- combination of coding/programming and artistic style
- use real world data to feed the system -> machine learning

Tips/Tricks
-> "Everyone who has done a little is already an expert!"

Links (from the chat)
- Wang Tiles
- Tile genetics
- Bachelor dissertattion - procedural planets
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
My favorite part :D

Tips/Tricks
-> "Everyone who has done a little is already an expert!"
We might not have the sharp focus of any of the one-man closed source projects, but we're still in a good place IMHO :)

Good show and the guy seems nice and happy to help discuss stuff. #gameai on Freenode might be a good channel to idle in to catch more nuggets of wisdom.
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
I was in there for that, yay! Saw the little doodle site too, handy.

I like the notion of limited length for rivers in infinite worlds based on height vs ocean. Start rivers up in mountains and let them run down the sides. If the river hasn't hit ocean after a certain length then potentially cancel it or create a lake. Could base it on drop over distance - if the river hasn't dropped appreciably over a few hundred meters then create a lake for it to empty into.
 
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