Topic awaiting preservation: PHP/GD terrian generator (Page 1 of 1)

I made this primarily for a MMORPG flash game that I'm developing. There's no edge of the map, so I needed the map to grow as the players explore. This is the best I could come up with for a terrain generator, powered purely by PHP and the GD library.

It's a basic fractal terrain, consisting of 4 separate fractals, since I needed them to seed off each other if the map is to grow without seams. I made and used this gradient for it.


http://zavaboy.com/phpbox/map_gen2.php

Additional things? Yes, maybe.
I'm going to see if I can make rivers, flowing based on the slopes, along with erosion if possible. It would be cool if I can get the rivers to develop deltas from the eroded land.

Pretty cool! Do you have color-coding for the terrain? Like the red/brown is mountains/highlands, white would be snow caps, etc.?


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Sort of... As I mentioned above, I used a gradient (linked above), to translate the grayscale altitude map produced by the fractal. I still don't know how I'm going to implement this into the game engine, but I'll do it somehow. I might just have the game engine do the terrain generation if it doesn't tax processing power too much. My game engine right now avarages around 35 - 40 FPS on my machine, though I have no 3D transformations yet.

Nice start.
Alas it looks way too "mid-point fractal"-ish. I suggest you to have a look at:

• robot frog | 3d | terrain generation tutorial
• GameDev.net - Adding Realistic Rivers to Random Terrain
• Hugo Elias on Perlin noise
• Ken Perlin's homepage
• Vterrain : Artificial Terrain Generation

To make the map "infinite", you could use some kind of predictive noise like Perlin or even a simple method with a known seed.


HTH



(Edited by poi on 11-21-2007 01:57)

Thanks poi!
I used a variation of the method explained here: http://gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html

Are you sharing the PHP code that generated this. Would love to see how it works.