A somewhat obscure piece of trivia.<p>There's code similar to this seen on a computer screen in digimon. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/gh3dK.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/gh3dK.jpg</a><p>A translation from the Basic dialect into Javascript
<a href="http://fingswotidun.com/code/index.php/Digimon" rel="nofollow">http://fingswotidun.com/code/index.php/Digimon</a><p>Press the play button to get it trying a series of random seeds.
Great writeup!<p><i>Notice that range stops just shy of 2π. Floating point math sometimes produces a final angle indistinguishably close to 2π, adding one extra vertex to our n-gon. To see for yourself, change (- tau 0.000001) to tau and set the number of sides to 6. You’ll see an extra point in the output very close to the starting point.</i><p>This is a "trick" that you find everywhere in graphics programming, and I can't believe we've been programming for over half a century and still have to deal with crap like that in our tooling. It leads to code that, while readable to the initiated programmer, is not what it <i>should be</i>.
This is cool, thanks for posting. I especially like how there are several styles of coastlines.<p>I'm really interested in algorithmic generation of topography, probably by first creating fractal stream networks (either from the coast/ low elevation boundary or from watersheds/drainage divides). I'm a geologist so most game-oriented topography generators look super unrealistic to me, but making stream networks and working from there would be helpful with quantitative landscape analysis and simulations. Anyone heard of anything like this? If nothing else, then some way of filling in a polygon with branch-like fractals?
See also the venerable xmountains (possibly already installed on your workstation).<p>Screenshot: <a href="https://osde8info.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/6a00d4141b9517685e00d09e56ce08be2b.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://osde8info.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/6a00d4141b9517...</a><p>There's a writeup on how it works:<p><a href="http://www2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/~spb/xmountains/about_xmountains.html" rel="nofollow">http://www2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/~spb/xmountains/about_xmountains.h...</a><p>I don't know how old it is, but the timestamp at the bottom of the HTML file above is 1997.
Nice. For those interested in the topic Amit Patel has a great article on polygonal map generation. Also discusses features like elevation, moisture, rivers etc:<p><a href="http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/" rel="nofollow">http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...</a>
Really cool! beyond the generation, I learned about <a href="https://github.com/viebel/klipse" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/viebel/klipse</a> which looks pretty cool. The whole post also makes me want to look more into clojure.<p>Aside: Is it OK to not have a <head> element?
Neat! I got a very marshy one on my third generation: <a href="http://imgur.com/doRJskF" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/doRJskF</a>
It's broken. I just used it, and it randomly generated Australia (<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/3aa5mr7gvbbmpc5/australia.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/3aa5mr7gvbbmpc5/australia.png?dl=0</a>).
If you like this stuff, check <a href="https://github.com/Mindwerks/worldengine" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Mindwerks/worldengine</a>