Procedural Generation

The below shows a system I built a while ago, where you use two perlin maps to simulate temperature and precipitation to generate a semi-realistic biome model. I reused an old colour map to represent these biome values. Minecraft, for example, uses this same method.

Play with the sliders to get a sense of what does what.

Temperature

Scale 0.5

Frequency 0.5

Octaves 5

Persistence 0.5

Amplitude 0.5

Precipitation

Scale 0.5

Frequency 0.5

Octaves 5

Persistence 0.5

Amplitude 0.5

I won't go into how it works specifically, but noise functions can be used for all sorts. Having a sort of weighted location system is invaluable, particularly in game design. Pair that with logic and condition gates and you can generate an incredibly detailed, natural looking, world.

Dynamic Tiles (WIP)

Tile Count 12

Having designed a single UV tile, I converted it to coordinate data and generate tiles entirely with code. By pulling the biome data, I can then recolour each segment to create smooth terrain transitions, using a colour map of rgb values. The result is a wide range of terrain, stemming from a single pieces of art.

I originally developed this technique for my game Khôra, but found it too computationally taxing to use at the time. Although now having made this, maybe I should revisit it...