Domain Warping, domain distortion, or noise distortion is an effective technique to breathe additional life into noise maps by stretching and twisting them about, adding some excitement to the otherwise fairly uniform underlying noise.
We’ll demonstrate this technique by starting with a vanilla Perlin noise map as the base, and displacing its positions along two sets of Perlin noise maps to achieve a sum greater than its parts. Let’s dive right in:
A large part of Dance of Death v0.6.136 was the addition of world generation. Although the world is little more than a large island at the moment, the results are rather satisfying, even considering that the current method of generating terrain is purely based on elevation. After experimenting with a number of techniques, I settled on this simple formula: 1) Generate Fractal Perlin Noise, 2) Multiply noise by a radial gradient, and 3) Apply terrain and water line. Here is the breakdown:
In developing an algorithm to generate nodes that are guaranteed to be within a certain distance of each other, I stumbled over this interesting distribution of particles which were initially placed randomly then moved near their nearest neighbor. I’ve dubbed this particle system “Neural Particle Deposition” on account of the organic, neuron-like shapes it produces. Take a look:
Happy 2013 everyone! Rather than risking going three months without an update, I figured I’d post some teaser screenshots of the world generation progress on my latest project: