A few days ago I decided to look into terrain generation. My goal was to create enormous heightmaps to apply to spheres so I could create a randomly generated world. Well, I Googled left and right, I searched these forums, and I thought about it a lot. I couldn’t find any pages that would really help me! Until I found this page:
http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html
It was the most useful link ever. A few days later, I had a program that could randomly generate a heightmap, then load it into my renderer and actually display it! I’m very excited, and proud to show off my creation. Here’s a video showing it off:
8zgZNuprqzU
(on a side note, I have no idea how to embed youtube! Figured it out!)
On the more technical side of things, I use display lists that are called once when the heightmap is loaded in, and then they are never rebuilt. I use shaders to position and actually texture the triangles. I don’t just color them. I use triangle strips because otherwise I would be using a ton more vertices, and that’s about it!
Here’s the donwload:
goo.gl/g5Cols
(Sorry, I forgot to change the angle in which the player is created. Just turn around and look up and you should see the map)
Press ‘R’ to generate a random map
Press ‘H’ to reload the original heightmap
Currently, this is Windows only, sorry!
The terrain generator is pretty fast; it can generate ~12 million triangles in less than 5 seconds! Feel free to use any of my code, just open it up using JD-GUI!