Back to the Back to the Map

I returned to my work on the terrain builder. My thought was I would update it to build the land masses outward from their centers. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about it. In my head I was seeing it as working in a circular path outward.

The more I thought about it the less I liked it. Fortunately as I was coding the solution hit me. Recursion. So instead of going in circles around the center I would begin at the center with a distance variable set to zero. As I work out, passing that variable to iterative calls, I used it to decrease the likelihood of cells being land further from the center.
Each call checks the current point and calls the function for its neighboring points. The result vaguely looks like a continent crossed with a confetti explosion. When zoomed in to game play distance it actually looks pretty good. It even builds out some ... acceptable mountain patterns.

Now I need to work out collisions, currently it isn't quite right. Actually I need to do some collision work - game wide. Then I need to improve the variety of the terrains based on modifiers specified in the library files.

Back to the Map

I've decided to re-attempt the planet surface generation logic. My previous attempt was ... not so good. So this time around I've decided to keep it simple. The maps it generates are fully ASCII and everything is contained within the main class, no OOP classes etc, just methods within main.

I have some modifiers that will later be passed in to create different types of worlds - temperature, landmass counts, etc. These affect what is created. I start with the polar arctic regions then I create random landmass centers and work out from those.

I'm currently walking up and down the center then east and west from those points. That is working ... Ok. I need to tweak it to work all around the center outward, I think that will give me better shapes.

Once I am happy with those I'll move on to features like mountains, rivers, and lakes.

Then the trick will be making it OOP and converting ASCII to image tiles.