Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Tag Archives: procedural

Caves

Today I squashed an old bug… I had a cave planet whose generation ended up being this: So the player couldn’t get out of the initial drop zone! I have a lot of code to try to prevent this sort of thing, but sometimes some stuff falls through the cracks… That’s actually one of the […]

Finished name generation

The results weren’t as good as I hoped, but at least they’re fully procedural and there’s not many idiot names in the lists… I tried using a syllable-based system, but there are just too many of those, so the memory required for this algorithm would be just too much! Ended up using a list of […]

Random name generation

Still working on the random name generation, not 100% happy with the results… So far, the system with best quality is based on probability. I give the system a list of “good names”, and he builds a dictionary of probabilities, which describe the probability of character Z to come after character Y, after character X. […]

How original: lakes and rivers!

Yep, this week has been very original… I’m closer and closer, and the latest addition to the algorithms has really made a difference… After all the process is done, I now do a linear interpolation between the height of the river/lake and the surroundings, making it rise smoothly enough so that the water doesn’t escape! […]

Terrible work day…

Most of what I’ve done today got thrown away… That’s a sad thing that sometimes happens in development… I did a lot of experiments with the lake generation code, and I finally found something that I think actually works, by playing around with the parameterization of the algorithm… Since this whole process is taking about […]

Still lakes…

This is taking much longer than I wanted… Although I’m closer (and just found out I’m doing a lake every 4 cells), it’s still not good enough, the water doesn’t follow enough: The brightest points are the lake spawn points, but the water dies down too fast… I could do more iterations, but this takes […]

New rivers

Started work on the new river system… The current rivers are just a line lowering the terrain and replacing the voxel material: It has a lot of bugs (floating rivers, but that could be sorted), but it’s impossible to animate (especially because it doesn’t have an actual direction) and it doesn’t actually look like a […]

Enemy base generation

Well, some people came me to me and asked me how I was generating the procedural bases, so I decided to put this up to explain my ideas… Note that this isn’t ground-breaking stuff! I’m using it to build the pirate lairs (and space bases, etc), but it can be applied to any kind of […]