Trying to get procedural mod generation for Morrowind... long way off from completion.
So far I've gotten exterior heightmap generation working with a couple different types of noise, and I also implemented a basic uniformly distributed tree placement algorithm. Right now I support Bitter Coast, Ascadian Isle, and grazeland trees with random rotations, I need to look at adding a random scaling factor, too, to help break up the uniformity of the trees. Eventually I'd rather do proper distributions of flora, too, other than just a uniform distribution. In real life you'd expect to see forests, clearing, and patches of trees. Global structure is essential to avoiding your randomly generated content from looking just.... random.
I want to look at beginning to use more advanced procedural algorithms to give the terrain a more sensible global structure... in particular I'm interested in trying to impelement this paper. We'll see how it goes, but that'd be an excellent start to a more realistic looking landmass. After that I need to look into supporting more clutter in the same way that I'm doing the trees. Then I can look at adding enemies to the terrain.
Long term I also want to generate villages and towns as well, but I don't know as much about those sorts of algorithms. I have a couple references to study, however, starting with this survey. One advantage I have is that I currently have no intentions of getting into procedural building modeling, so it would only be the pathing and building placement algorithms that I'd have to think about, using the vanilla Morrowind assets.
Finally, procedural dungeons. I figure there ought to be plenty of papers and blogposts on how to go about generating those, but I haven't looked into any of the specifics yet.
The trickiest part about the last two paragraphs is that I'd have to start supporting interior cell generation as well... I don't know anything about how those are structured in the .esp mod format, and I also don't know anything about how the game handles NPCs, their AI, their pathing, their dialogue, ect... which is why those two longer term goals are somewhat long shots.
Using CMake, so build as normal. Requires C++14 support from compiler, so think gcc 5+.
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. && makeSuper valuable link for understanding Morrowind mod format: http://www.uesp.net/morrow/tech/mw_esm.txt http://www.mwmythicmods.com/tutorials/MorrowindESPFormat.html
Everything on here is helpful as well: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:File_Format
Used the Enchanted Editor for verification of my parsing.
