[MOD] Distant Terrain

[jman0war]

I wonder would it be feasible to create meshes of "landscape features" similar to city blocks, and drop them onto the landscape, maybe those northern provinces that are barren, Ykalon and Northmoor.

Meshes something like this:


Or maybe a landscape feature of a rolling hills.

[Narf the Mouse]

Edit: The point, because I kind of lost track of it, is, yeah; you can do the same thing you can do with cave blocks, with landscape blocks. That's why, if you have an older ***Minecraft world, old enough to have gone through one or more world generation updates, you can find probably sheer cliffs across entire blocks where newer-generated block doesn't match up to the older-generated block next to it. So, generate blocks of land deformation using comparable techniques to that listed below, and you can get varied terrain, that matches at the edges.

So you might be wondering *how games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have all those different large caves...

So, I've talked about "Perlin Noise" before, and how you can use it to generate landscape. Well, if you picture that landscape in your head, then wrap it around a clear plastic block... That's basically how you generate cave meshes with it. Then you generate, say, a bunch of 4x4 meter blocks; corners, sides, intersections, floors with ceilings, ceilings and floors without floors or ceilings, pits, whatevwer.

"But wait!", you say. "If you do that, how do you get the edges to match?" Well, I'm glad you asked, whoever asked, else this segway would be very awkward.

At the edges of the mesh, you generate using a specific seed. As you move away from the edges, you generate using the block seed.

So, if you always use seed 1234567890 to at the edges, and a random seed for each block, your cave meshes will appear entirely random, and it's unlikely that anyone will check for regular patterns while standing at the side of a cave.

And, if you have, say, one cave seed per cave type (limestone cave, granite cave, abandoned mine, etc), you can get even more variation, because you're probably not going to connect a limestone cave directly to a granite cave. Or a stone block dungeon.

Which brings me to connecting blocks.

With connecting blocks, assuming it's a tunnel or doorframe, side A is generated using cave seed A; side B is generated using cave seed B. Away from each opening, you use a random block seed as normal. Then you can either mix the textures in the middle, or throw a **doorframe around it.

As always, the Crazyman is in the details.

* I don't actually know how they generate the cave blocks. This is just one method cave blocks can be generated.

** And now you know one reason why there's almost always a doorframe where one dungeon/cave connects to another cave/dungeon. Note that with some games (naming no names), if you carefully examine a doorframe, you might see where things don't match up or have gaps... Or you might already know that.

*** I don't actually know how Minecraft makes its world, either. If I had to guess, I would say most likely Perlin Noise in the very early versions, and a more complex world-generation function in later updates. But that's just a guess.

Edit 2: Yaay, more edits! Anyway, for connecting blocks, you can also just generate half a connecting block using seed 1234567890 or some other seed, as long as you use the same one, for the connecting part. That way, all of your connecting blocks match. Then you just throw a doorframe around it.

And, of course, you can always just use a doorframe to cover a lack of match.

[jman0war]

Not sure where the best place to put this, but this thread seems appropriate.
Check out this article from Slate.com: The Daggerfall Paradox
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... games.html

Compares the procedural generation of DF to No Man's Sky.
Names one of the coders: Hal Bouma, that help create the map.
Might be a good lead

[Narf the Mouse]

Not sure where the best place to put this, but this thread seems appropriate.
Check out this article from Slate.com: The Daggerfall Paradox
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... games.html

Compares the procedural generation of DF to No Man's Sky.
Names one of the coders: Hal Bouma, that help create the map.
Might be a good lead

tl;dr - Why cities in Daggerfall use premade geomorph tiles, and then assemble them.

Without reading the article, and as an additional bit of info that's probably helpful if the article doesn't cover it is that you shouldn't use procedural generation directly.

Under caveats. Plenty of popular and successful *Roguelikes use procedural generation directly to generate dungeons. A simple room-and-corridor algorithm will give you a random assortment of rooms and corridors for your player's characters to wander around, kill monsters in, and most likely eventually be killed. It's entertaining enough. Turning that into something that can generate crypts, caves, orc forts, dwarven halls, and etc. on demand is both something I've never actually done, something that's rather **hard to do, and something that's easy to get wrong.

So, yeah. Procedural generation means your small program can theoretically generate all the content it needs. Practically speaking, though, it's actually a lot simpler to just hire a bunch of people to make maps for you.

I mean, just take a look at how long that Dwarf Fortress guy has been working at his game...

I may be sending mixed signals here. Procedural generation is great...If used wisely, carefully, and to generate some parts of the game. Also, you may end up throwing out fifty bad results before you get one good result.

Fortunately, algorithms to throw out bad results can work faster than the algorithms that make them.

You're still probably going to run into the same problem Civ's had with its maps since Civ 1 - "Generic layout of Generica."

And while even that is theoretically fixable, practically speaking...

* So, like, one of the hundred people you know well might have heard of that one...

** You might be wondering how I can say something is hard, when I've never managed it myself. Well, first, I've tried, and second, the same way a mechanic can look at a new piece of machinery and say "Yep, that's going to be pretty bad to fix." And third, I've seen a description of an algorithm to do it, and it was much harder.

[charlieg]

Under caveats. Plenty of popular and successful *Roguelikes use procedural generation directly to generate dungeons. A simple room-and-corridor algorithm will give you a random assortment of rooms and corridors for your player's characters to wander around, kill monsters in, and most likely eventually be killed. It's entertaining enough.

The vast majority of these generators create pretty rubbish results. DCSS has a load of different types but most dungeons are a complete mess. They are just about passable for a grid based top down view but for a first person experience? They'd be awful.

[Narf the Mouse]

Under caveats. Plenty of popular and successful *Roguelikes use procedural generation directly to generate dungeons. A simple room-and-corridor algorithm will give you a random assortment of rooms and corridors for your player's characters to wander around, kill monsters in, and most likely eventually be killed. It's entertaining enough.

The vast majority of these generators create pretty rubbish results. DCSS has a load of different types but most dungeons are a complete mess. They are just about passable for a grid based top down view but for a first person experience? They'd be awful.

You may need to inject more British in your reading when you get to "entertaining enough", if the meaning was not apparent.

[Biboran]

Hmm maybe it was already disscused, but what about voxel landscape?

[jman0war]

can the world be broken up into cells like the other TES games?

[Biboran]

can the world be broken up into cells like the other TES games?

I asked this twise with my plan to build world from pre-maded cells like actually cities builded

[username]

I might have found a bug, I'm not really sure if the terrain fading toggle works properly, basically even when I switch it off my game still has that weird floating layer with the weird cutoff between the normal terrain and the distant one. I'm using build #77.

Edit: Also your link to the released mods page is outdated although I tried both 2.1.0 and 2.0.1 and it didn't seem to work.