David Williams wrote:
I guess it depends how much artistic control you want over the output. If you are starting with a heightmap then this actually gives you quite a lot of control, and you can make sure that your hills and valleys all appear in the right place. With just 3D noise you can get some nice (and infinite) results but there's a bit more luck involved as to eactly what it looks like.
Not necessarily, I think. With something as flexible as ANL, I could easily imagine using different combinations of noises, offsets, constants, etc. all depending on the biome.
So, the "thinking" of the responsible function would be: "Ahhh, you want the value of the voxel at x/y/z! Okay, that means we#re in the plains biome and I have to chain this and that and this... *strange noises* then flatten it a bit *boing!*, apply an offset. Done! Here you are! *ka-ching*"
David Williams wrote:
Haha, yeah the famous GPU gems 3 Chapter 01. The article is nice, but IMO completely useless for any real world application. It has all the terrain info in the GPU, but a game actually needs it in the CPU for AI, physics, pathfinding, etc.
So that would make you end up doing the same algorithm twice (once for each *PU). Also, that generation alone puts quite a lot of heat on the GPU. And it does nothing but displaying the terrain.
The article does have a few interesting tidbits that are not tied to the GPU, though.
And who knows, if I have too much time during the project, I might end up implementing that as a dynamic loading screen
David Williams wrote:
Yes, I've seen that library and it does look very interesting. I'm sure you've seen
this page and the images at the bottem came from PolyVox. I'm not sure how actively developed it is though, I couldn't see any commits in the repository.
Funny, I didn't know that was from PolyVox
Well, it is not currently maintained, but it is from 2011 and by that, it is the most recent library. Noise++ is about 4-5 years old and libnoise... 8? 9? 10? I don't know
The only interesting thing about libnoise (to me) is that it has a good example of noise worms (used in Minecraft to generate the tunnels and mines).
And the good thing about ANL is that the author is still pretty alive and active on the gamedev.net forum, so one can actually contact him for questions.