Procedural cave challenge

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I’ve been messing around trying to see what ways I can bend noise to do my bidding. Trying to make caves which would be interesting to explore is a lot of fun.
It would be cool to see what other people can come up with! Its hard to get a good mix of unique features working together on different scales.

This one has 18 layers of noise stacked and hacked together in various ways. White is walls, black is open areas. I have been building this with a floor-plan view in mind, although it looks like it could work as a side on view if you had a jet pack.

(full image 3000x3000, 380kb): https://www.dropbox.com/s/hqka9d2ykg1na0m/NoiseCaveBig.png?dl=0

#2

I think the ratio between open and walls is much too high. It should contain more walls, but that’s maybe personal preference :slight_smile:

I really like thouse small, narrow cave paths it generates a lot, though. Also, converting this to side-view is easy by scaling the noise either down on x-axis or up on y-axis :slight_smile:

#3

Here’s a map from a different generator. First it builds a large scale “density of rock” map, and then uses that to modify how far tunnels can dig into certain places. I’ve flood filled some of it with different colors to see what kind of connectivity the tunnels have. Theres a good variety of long and short tunnel systems, although they don’t really branch out much tending to create clumps. Would these be interesting to explore, or just confusing?

#4

There are so many possibilities:

This the original data before it is turned into black and white:

#5

That looks really awesome I must say! :smiley:

I’m not sure if it is as enjoyable as the standard Cellular-automata cave-generation algoirthm yet, but here’s an idea:
modify the noise with another layer of standard perlin/simplex/whatever noise with pretty low frequency, changing the threshold of walls to generate at some parts. Then there is a little more diversity in the size of the caves, currently it looks already very good though. :slight_smile: Keep trying out some things, this looks promising! :slight_smile:

#6

These are really beautiful - they look like how the distribution of mass in the early universe is sometimes depicted. I wonder what would happen if you gave the non-white pixels some mass and let it all collapse in on itself…

As for caves I’d think the interest would mostly be what things are in the caves rather than the shape specifically. Or at least if the shape mattered it’d be because of the game mechanics the caves have to test - i.e. jetpack as you said or scuba gear or something.

#7

I’ve decided to try a slightly different approach here and begin my map generation shortly after the big bang. I’m creating a set of various data maps which I can use to build information about my planets. This one shows 4 different levels of geologic activity that a planet might have, which will have an effect on mineral formation, geothermal activity, rock type, cave shape, etc. I could also make it a feature where the player can have some sort of geology scanner which will allow them to visualize this map to help them decide where to go digging for resources. Hopefully the astute player will be able to learn that certain geographical features are often associated with specific resources, etc.

#8

I found some cave generation stuff on this page:

http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-algorithm:caves

Such as this:

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Cellular_Automata_Method_for_Generating_Random_Cave-Like_Levels

#9

There were planets shortly after the big bang? :persecutioncomplex: You need to work on your backing story a bit :slight_smile: