After reading material and trying out different examples for days I feel like I have hit a brick wall. Please note in advance I have read most posts and the wiki article on this topic, I’m just looking for some good advice.
I’ve been working on a 2D terrain generation system for a new game I’m working on, and after some reading decided to shoot for a Perlin noise powered implementation. After some reading, I found the following article:
How to Use Perlin Noise in Your Games: http://devmag.org.za/2009/04/25/perlin-noise/
I thought, “Brilliant! Finally an implementation I can seem to understand!” I put hands to keyboard and began writing an implementation based off the article. After running the code and finally getting some visual output I felt relief at first, and then slowly annoyance. Below are samples of my output.
I’m annoyed because this “random” noise seems to generate features which appear as horizontal or vertical compostions of mountains or ponds. There are virtually no diagonal lines and very few circular formations. I went back to the original article to discover that the implementation was not Perlin noise, but instead a variation of value noise.
So I scrap my pervious implementation and start again. I begin by implementing the version of Perlin noise featured on Riven’s blog:
PerlinNoise :: smooth/turbulent : http://riven8192.blogspot.fr/2009/08/perlinnoise.html
Even though it seems to be in 3D space, I assume I can set Z to zero and all will be merry. Well so I thought, but once I test the code and find that for all possible inputs I was getting 0 from each call to the smoothNoise function.
Again, I feel like I have hit a brick wall, and I need to ask advice before I keep wasting any more of my time. Firstly, is the sort of horizontal/vertical features in value noise normal? And if they are, does Perlin noise not feature this? Lastly, if someone could point me in the direction of a functional Perlin noise implementation I would greatly appreciate it, as I am begining to think I am trying to understand something way out of my league 