I have become a bit fascinated with procedural generation lately and decided to try my hand at some terrain generation. After doing some googling (google knows everything you know...
) I decided I'd start with using a simplex noise filter. Luckily someone had already translate the original example written by Ken Perlin in Java to Lua. It was in the form of a module however. Also they where including the LuaBit functions for their bitwise operations.In any case LevyBreak posted his original translation here: http://www.facepunch.com/threads/834088
I took this, stripped out the 3D and 4D operations and converted it so that it built a table and returned it. It made it easier to use in LOVE, as I think loading the module was causing some goofiness in the loader.
MapGen I based on another Java script which was written by Wade Kallhoff http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/kallhw/
The original source can be found here: http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/kallhw/world/world.txt
I also modified LuaBit (because the way it was built using do <stuff> end) was causing issues with it working in LOVE as well: Attempt to index global "bit" a nil value... wat?!
) and included that so that we didn't need to get messy with the functions in the Simplex Noise library.In any case, I was originally disappointed with the results, mainly because I had never knowingly seen the results of perlin/simplex noise filters before. After doing some googling trying to figure out what I could have possibly done wrong, I discovered that this is the way the filter actually turns out. Silly me.
So I was happy again.
Just a pre-warning however, this is still extremely simple. I just wanted to share what I had so far.
MapGen.love- (6.3 KiB) Downloaded 490 times
In any case, I hope to make this more useful as I work on it, and eventually turn it into a full blown library for LOVE. So if anyone has any suggestions, critiques, comments or contributions feel free to share!
Some future features I already have in mind:
- Ability to fine tune noise detail and add random seed capability
- Add the ability to pre-gen a map using noise and apply other filters on top of it. For instance, pre-gen using diamond-square fractal noise and modify it by simplex (which would probably turn out much better looking maps) and allow you to fine tune how the filter is applied.
- Add the ability to generate a Lua table in a format which can be used by Advanced Tiled Loader http://love2d.org/wiki/Advanced_Tiled_Loader (because I like it)
In any case, I found this to be a very interesting learning experience so far, and easier than I had originally anticipated it to be. I hope this helps someone else out as well.
*Edit: Durr... helps if I upload the file. lol
