Hello!
I was wondering if you have any suggestions on how to get started with procedural world generation, even if it's something as relatively basic as mapping a generated heightmap onto an icosphere.
Can you tell me a bit more about the use case? I think it would vary.
In general I would say focus on visualizing as much information as possible. In my world I for example have the option to click on any tile during runtime, and see a dump of ALL variables connected to that tile. cellId, elevation, neighbourCellIds, temperature etc. This kind of debugging will help enormously, whatever the use case is.
Also make the implementations as separate as possible. If you for example simulate both vegetation growth and plate tectonics. Those should most likely be independent, structure your program such that you could run them independantly to reduce "nested complexity".
Another general thing is parameter handling. Simulations like these might have ALOT of parameters to tweak. Making it easy to select parameters, and do reruns on the exactly same parameters will be valuable in the long run. Also setting up the simulation so that you can create multiple worlds in sequence, save each to file/image and then compare them afterwards, and see how certain parameters affect the outcome makes it easier for you to test, and get the results you desire.
Hello again and thanks for the reply.
I intend to use it to generate semi-realistic maps and terrain for D&D, but I have no experience with generating terrain outside of playing with Terragen and PerfectWorldDF in the past.
I want to derive a region's biome from a combination of elevation, overall 'steepness' of the terrain, how wet a region is would be determined by a drainage map, temperature map, and a precipitation & rain shadow map. The effects of erosion would also be affected by how deep the soil layer goes before it hits rock.
But for now, I need to figure out the basic step of converting an icosphere to a hexagon (+12 pentagon) sphere and mapping a seamless noise map to it, I saw your video on creating the hex sphere, but I have little to no idea on how to implement it in either UE5, Godot, or Blender. I'm leaning more towards using one of the 2 game engines for the simulation aspects of it.