Theory
The key points on theory and applications of procedural generation is described in the series Procedural Generation parts 1 to 3, where we looked at a number of elements that could describe our virtual world. In this section we look at a practical implementation, combining all the different elements.
Implementation
As application I chose a scenario based on the 3 part article, to generate a artificial 'world' with a varied terrain, climate and biomes. As I was making the implementation while writing the previous articles, the implementation is consistent with the information in the articles.
The tool of choice was Microsoft Visual Studio, C# .net using WPF. WPF actually comes with a 3D engine (using the WPF component 'ViewPort3D') which was surprisingly easy to use, and ideal for implementing the visualisation of this atificially generated world. Credit also goes to the WriteableBitmapEx extension, which extends the WPF bitmap with convenient access functionality.
The resulting application is crude, but includes a number of illustrative components:
- Selection of key parameters such as the master seed number
- A bitmap representation of the generated map (where 1 pixel represents 1 square km in this case)
- Numerical key statistics on terrain / biomes
- A 3D view of the current location within the map including immidiate surrounding
Download
Download ProceduralWorldGenerator
Links