Day 6

I focused on terrain generation today. My game is rendered in 3D, but the ground itself is completely flat. So all I need to do is generate some flat planes. Simple, right?

I started out following Sebastian Lague’s Procedural Terrain Generation playlist (starting at video #7, because I like to be in over my head, apparently). It took me a while to realize that I was wasting my time on generating perlin noise when I had no height to worry about, and no change in color based on the height. I looked at a couple of other videos, and then gave up and decided to write it myself.

I’ve already used the “One Eternity Later” image, so I don’t want to use it again, but trust me when I say this took me a long time, and caused a lot of frustration, as well as some laughter at how bad it was.

Anyway, after all that, terrain gets generated in an infinite line as you move forwards. You can’t throw yourself off the edge of the world any more (unless you jump off the side).

At some point soon, I need to prevent jumping off the side, either by adding invisible walls, generating planes beside you, or something like that. I also need to generate some trees and other decorations on all of this terrain.

I don’t want my game to run forever, so I also need to figure out how I’m going to stop the generation, and switch back to “tailored” areas.