Project Progress and Meeting

October 13th, 2009

I met with Dr Louis Natanson this morning to get some help pinning down an area for my honours project. This successfully abated many of the worries that I’d had about my chosen topic, although of course along with new suggestions come new concerns and considerations.

As I suspected, the research question I formulated previously was both too tightly focussed and somewhat misguided.

However, the original idea of improving the asset pipeline through a tool or language remained in tact and I was encouraged to regard that as a starting point for refining my research. I maintain some degree of hesitation regarding this as it will be challenging to uphold a technical focus rather than investigating the users and aesthetic aspects of this tool. I’m also anxious about the breadth of the topic, especially having been encouraged to research various types of procedural content rather than just geometry, which already seemed a vast and varied area.

Hopefully working through worksheet two again before progressing to worksheet three will help re-align and focus the project as I continue to read and research the surrounding area.

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Simplex Noise

March 30th, 2009

No huge update, just figured I’d share some screenshots from my terrain generation/openGL project:

Here, several octaves of Perlin noise (on the left) and Simplex noise (right) are layered to produce a fairly bland landscape. At the moment I’m not sure whether to get it a little more bumpy or to leave it flat and try and plot some buildings. These maps both use 2D noise, inputing X and Z coordinates to give a height at each point.

perlinnoise3 simplexnoise2

 
 As these top-down views show, Perlin noise (left) is less ‘active’ than Simplex noise given the same values. Simplex noise is also lacking Perlin noise’s distinctive thread-like patterns.
perlinnoise4 simplexnoise4

 
 These images both show Simplex noise using the same X and Z coordinates, this time using time as a final variable in generating 3D noise in order to allow different landscapes to be produced.
simplextime1simplexnoise2

 
 Finally, here’s the landscape with a river cutting through it. As you can see it still needs some work – the repetitive sin wave is far too obvious at this scale – but the function is actually very flexible and after some experimentation with values and some more variation I think it will be fine.
simplexwithriversimplexwithriver2

 
 The next step is to look at using noise maps to create procedural and possibly animated textures, and getting some water in there.

In other news:

  • We’re demonstrating and handing over our group project game “Some Assembly Required” to the BBC tomorrow. It’s looking rather nice (screenshots and videos to follow) and we might need to do a little more work before our coursework hand-in, but I think the whole team is pretty pleased with the final product.
  • The whole “Variables don’t vary” deal with functional languages is only weird when you stop and think about it. When you actually get to writing code, it isn’t really something you notice. Just a different mindset I guess. In other words, my experimentation with Haskell continues.

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