Programming terrain from scratch using C++ and OpenGL by Shamus Young (2006)

I just finished watching a live-coding session (from 2 years ago) by Inigo Quilez (ex Pixar), where he constructs an entire ray-marched landscape using only maths (mostly SDFs) in pure GPU shader code.<p>The stream: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE</a><p>The demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;4ttSWf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;4ttSWf</a>

This reminds me of NeHe’s OpenGL tuts. That, and a little earlier Denthor’s mode13h tut, changed my life. Good times.

I loved this series and his procedural city. His death was a great loss for the recreational programming and gaming community.

I remember being blown away by something similar on the venerable Commodore Amiga in the early 90s. Can&#x27;t remember the name of the app, but you&#x27;d adjust a few parameters and line by line a terrain may would appear.

I really miss reading new blog posts and series from Shamus :(

I also enjoyed his similar series on generating a procedural city: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shamusyoung.com&#x2F;twentysidedtale&#x2F;?p=2940" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shamusyoung.com&#x2F;twentysidedtale&#x2F;?p=2940</a>

I don&#x27;t think it was this tutorial, but something similar I did around 2006 after completing a year of games programming study. Generating noise as height maps, mapping height ranges for texture blending and creating these terrains had me hooked on programming. Sadly, web development was just a lot more lucrative, so I dropped C++ for C#, and only done games dev as a hobby every now and then. I love these kind of tutorials though, same with Open GL NeHe, Game Programming Gem books, GPU Gems, etc. Good times!

Yet another &quot;Hey, this reminds me of a similar thing&quot; contribution: Sean Barrett (of the STB header-only libraries fame) has a series of coding livestreams going over his OpenGL voxel rendering library and sort of turning it into a game:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kD93nsghj9A&amp;list=PLMkT-w6m06QvQaGJKw7vRuPlnYJWczvPj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kD93nsghj9A&amp;list=PLMkT-w6m06...</a>

its interesting... but i do wonder how we went from planet scale and infinite terrains in the earlier 2000s and late 90s down to &quot;lets just do one little square&quot;. granted this looks a lot prettier...