Island Generation

Fleshed out the side scrolling a bit, and ran a pass through the array to fill in some of those bitwise gaps. Included some particles and the ocean as well. Really enjoying working on this! the grass is generated at random based on some variables I plug in, as well as the particles.

I made an endlessly generating map with these 5 events:

Just include a global variable called GridSize (mine is set to 64) and make sure your tiles are double that size with soft edges (faded out alpha for a soft-blend) - then make the background of the layout black. This will give you a nice "fog of war" effect.

~Sol

I made an endlessly generating map with these 5 events:

Just include a global variable called GridSize (mine is set to 64) and make sure your tiles are double that size with soft edges (faded out alpha for a soft-blend) - then make the background of the layout black. This will give you a nice "fog of war" effect.

~Sol

Dude sweet, can I see the result?

Ummmm yeah actually... if you go to my project thread and click the link (then press TAB to change to the map - and drag the yellow circle around to generate more map tiles - use arrow keys to scroll the screen) then you sure can!

~Sol

SoldjahBoy there's a lot of complex things happening in that demo!

SoldjahBoy there's a lot of complex things happening in that demo!

Yeah it's getting there

I want to see what you come up with using your gen stuff too... I might contact you soon about the methods you used to define where your water bodies are, and how you went about setting that up. My map will be less detailed in that sense, but it would still be nice to have some logical placement of things like rivers.

~Sol

SoldjahBoy fire away man! I'm still pretty new to a lot of procedural generation logic though. Rivers can be tricky with a height map, especially if you're using a bitwise method (which you're not as far as I can tell). Mine aren't actually working quite how I intended.

Are your weather effects pretty efficient? I think part of the fun in developing this kind of stuff is not knowing what your algorithm will spit out each time.

All of my map stuff is "flat" because it's a top-down view map. Rivers will basically be somehow "drawn" or "doodled" onto the tiles, maybe.

My weather is pretty okay actually. I have limited it to around 200 "particles" and each "particle" is drawn with several streaks of rain/snow/etc and randomised speed. Each particle block is actually fairly large to give the impression of more individual particles, but in reality there is like 10 streaks of rain or about 8 snowflakes per image.

So as far as having a blank tile set goes, I want to be able to specify a series of things - like terrain type (grass,dirt,sand,etc) as well as have points of interest (like a town that generates random(x) number of buildings). Everything is tile based so things like towns would, I guess, be generated from some kind of central "Seed point" and just spawn buildings around/near it until the conditions are satisfied. I can probably figure it out, but any tips on how you did your islands would be appreciated. Did you start with aLL water and place the land over it... or the other way around?

~Sol

Late night update... creeping on some elk during sunset

working on a day/night system (pretty much completed, just needs some better visuals), ducking, crawling, and running for the player, etc. next I'm hoping to get some basic AI for NPCs going.

Slowly but surely plugging away. This has been a really neat project to work on, and I've learned a ton. In this example, I randomly generated a mountain, in part using the bitwise method and TMX files, as well as using the spelunky style of level generation. You only see the peak of the mountain here and some hastily drawn mountain peaks in the background, but the whole mountain is huge!

Next I'll be adding in more variation in the different parts of the mountain, as well as some enemy interactions. I'm planning on adding in some caves, too. We'll see how long that takes... this literally took like 3 weeks to figure out!

Anyways if anyone out there is still following along, thanks

Really nice, where will it be available to download?

Slick

~Sol

thanks guys!

KnivetonStudios - probably steam...

For the sake of scale, here's a fairly large generated mountain:

(I know these aren't the tightest graphics right now - thanks for following along regardless!)

In game development it's less about quantity and more about variety...

When you said steam will it be free or paid if it gets greenlight?