mattdietz.net (games)

Perlin Noise for terrain generation

Matt Dietz — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 18:52:44 GMT

One of the things I find fascinating is the idea of "random" content generation for games, and lately I've been fascinated with procedural generation of maps and terrain. One of the things that seems to be most prevalent in games is the need for realistic looking terrain. A common technique for this is generating Heightmaps for use in commercial game engines like Unity and Unreal as well voxel based games like Minecraft. The values of the individual pixels of the heightmap are interpreted literally as terrain elevation. The problem with heightmap generation is it's tough to produce natural looking terrain with random numbers alone. This is where Perlin noise comes in.

As you can see, Perlin noise is wonderful for generating things that look like terrain:

Compiling SFML for broader OS/X compatibility

Matt Dietz — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 21:04:39 GMT

I recently competed in Ludum Dare 27, and one of the biggest struggles I had was making an application I built on the command line on my machine actually run for others. The first sign that I should have considered alternative frameworks was when I could only get SFML to link properly into my game when I built it from bleeding edge source. However, I'd been trucking along just fine using the compiled dylibs. I had been assuming the entire time that it was sufficient to include code and instructions for building the project yourself, but when the barrier to entry is too high, people will simply prefer all the Unity and HTML5 Canvas games. It's hard to blame them, really.

So, I set out to figure out how to package up SFML with my binary and ship it. After stumbling through a bunch of mediocre attempts to include the SFML dylibs in the zip file I submitted ot the competition, I finally realized the only thing left to do was construct a Mac app bundle.

Enter XCode.

Ludum Dare, 18 Hours to go!

Matt Dietz — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 01:14:13 GMT