Squishy's Random Gen App

[mrsquish]

Hey all,

 

So I'm working on my own random gen app as I'm really not happy with the latest iteration from TFP.

 

Here's my first pass at Biome.png (this is a thumbnail of a 4k png, the desert color is not correct)

 

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_FfK8I7S3Lkb1thF0JXexX_IqnBc9CzZ

 

Cheers,

[mrsquish]

Here's my first cut at a Desert Canyon like Biome.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-LIsa-7g9tNbeAx80wefPjaE1wOgeBz6

[mrsquish]

So just a bit of a rundown on this project.

 

With this generator, I'm aiming to create some truely interesting "biomes". And I mean that in a sense that is seperate to TFP "Biomes". The first one is the DesertCanyon one that I posted a pic of, then a more flat desert one. Each of my "Biomes" will have it's own Biome.png that can contain multiple TFP biomes, in the case of the Desert ones, I intend on adding some green oasis. Each of my biomes will have it's own dta.png, splat, prefab.xml etc.

 

Right at the end of the generation process, all the biomes will be mixed and blended together. (That is going to be tricky).

 

I figure this process will take ages to generate, but if your a dedicated server hoster, or someone that just likes a good seed, then you wouldn't mind generating overnight.

 

I've got a few ideas for "Biomes" I want to create :

 

Nasty biome : Think the maze in Maze runner. The base biome would be burnt, but with different decorations (e.g. no fires etc), just black trees and dead bushes, all the water is toxic. Sub biomes would have thick burnt trees (to the point where they would block the way). This is an endgame biome.

 

The "Green" : When I do the "green" biomes, I intend on making areas of thick forest and areas of only grass. Put trees along rivers. Have cleared areas for farm land.

 

Another idea is to have a kind of Badlands concept, sort of a more extreme desert canyon, but the canyons are deep and more frequent. Then I wanted to make some cave like prefabs that would create "cut outs" and tunnels in the cliff walls.

 

I think the worlds now are far too easy to get around. In most cases, you can run up most mountains without much effort. I love exploring, but I'd prefer to have to work for it a bit more, there should be landscape obsticles just like in real life.

 

I'm open to more ideas.

[mrsquish]

So, I tried to fix the stepping last night and a bit today. I refactored the code that wrote the png to use 16bit greyscale PNG, which is is now outputing (as evidenced by Krita detecting it as such), however after all that effort it still doesn't work. The stepping persists.

 

New screenshot : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1A2ts8WSyvRJ9ZOED_F0Kg7S1BeWjCVvL

 

At this point I have two options,

1) Try and output to a tga (TARGA) file format and see if that makes any difference,

2) Try and output directly to the Raw format.

 

Number 2 would obviously be the better option going forward, but given I don't currently have software that reads it it's going to be difficult.

[mrsquish]

Started working on the next Biome concept, the nasty biome. This is the first go at the heightmap for it. Looks pretty cool.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uh_axz4WKBBaR6wAbwUuPbCVf-EyDfWg

 

Would make for some interesting PVP action.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Also, looks like I've found the code that loads a tga.raw file. So now I just need to understand it so that I can write one.

[SlicksGirl]

good job!

 

here i am making designs in 8 colors with a completely different approach..

 

i too would like to see clusters of trees and wide open meadow.. so making two forest biomes.. one with trees and one without and making the one with trees a densely populated some biome of the meadow one

 

then repeating this idea for each of the others..

 

because plants dont just grow everywhere in real life, they are clustered aroudn resources.. or wear a tree kept reseeding itself into a forest.

[Guppycur]

You're describing sub-biomes, fyi.

 

So you'd just add the "fewer" or "more" tree blocks spawning in the subbiomes of the main biome in biomes.xml.

[mrsquish]

here i am making designs in 8 colors with a completely different approach..

I thought about doing what you're doing, but I hate doing things by hand. Although your post re biome editing will be invaluable when I need to create new ones. Like now actually with the Nasty biome.

 

because plants dont just grow everywhere in real life, they are clustered aroudn resources.. or wear a tree kept reseeding itself into a forest.

Yeah I know right! In any populated area Trees have been cut down etc.

 

Same same for roads too, the don't randomly cut through anywhere, they follow paths of least resistance, span across gaps with bridges or go through hills with tunnels when there's no other option.

 

Not looking forward to road generation, that is going to be tricky.

 

PM me SlicksGirl if you want the code, it's C#

[mrsquish]

So, just a quick update.

 

Looks like the dta.raw file is a 16bit Little Endian encoded file with no file headers. The code that I found that reads the file looks a little odd (maybe due to converting from IL) but there's some seemingly redudant lines of code that deal with how the file is looped through that I need to look at further, but from a glance, it looks to be really easy to write a raw file.

[mrsquish]

You're describing sub-biomes, fyi.

 

So you'd just add the "fewer" or "more" tree blocks spawning in the subbiomes of the main biome in biomes.xml.

 

So "subbiomes" are a real entity in the biomes.xml, I didn't realise that. I'm almost at the stage now that I'm going to start poking around in there. Do they have their own color though? Like how do you control where they are?

[mrsquish]

Hey all, I've fixed the smoothing!! I now write directly to dtm.raw and can now have perfectly smoothed landscapes. Here's the latest screenshot of the Desert Canyon Biome

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LIg3Dic7yjV3t5AGD1rIykJQfcUP-w4R

[ecv]

Sounds like an interesting project. May I ask, what programming language do you use? Just curious