loringalta / procedural-terrain

Procedural Terrain Generation in C

It has been 32 years since Ken Perlin won an Academy Award for his develop- ment of Perlin Noise while working on the movie Tron. Since then, not much has changed in the world of procedural terrain generation. One reason is that the inherent “randomness” of procedural techniques hinders its implementation in the real world. Perlin Noise allows the user some degree of control, which is immensely useful when designing worlds, and games in which the user has to have a coherent and non-volatile experience. However, Procedural Generation Techniques are fast and most importantly easy to understand and use. I im- plemented the following algorithms by using heightmaps. They are simple 2D arrays of values that represent the heights of the terrain. Limitations of this approach include the inability to produce caves or overhangs.