Map Generator

Project to create a random fantasy map. My motivation for the project came from a game I was trying to make a while back, which required a randomly generated map, so I decided to make one myself. I tried to make one using voronoi diagrams at that time, but got stuck in it and left both the game and the map. The idea never left me though, and I started work on the map generation again, even though the game it was supposed to be used for, has been abandoned.

Screenshots

The Approach

I started out with generating voronoi diagrams, they are used because they produce a really organic looking landscape without having to alter them too much. The approach I used has been popularised by Amit P. in his blog. Basically, it involves creating a bunch of random points, creating a voronoi diagram out of them, and then relaxing those points a few times (4 in my case) to smooth them out.

Next step was to figure out a way to generate a heightmap, and assign it to the polygons created by voronoi triangulation. Perlin noise comes to the rescue here. One of the great things about Perlin Noise is that it generates a smooth heightmap, and you can layer a bunch of noise together to create as much detail as you want. It does have a drawback however, it is normally distributed. This means that a lot more numbers will be generated close to it's middle (0.5 in this case) rather than its edges. Therefore we need to do a few mathematical operations on it in order to make it usable and generate a more realistic terrain.

Scope for improvement

The terrain generated does not have a lot of detail, which can be improved by increasing the noisiness in the map.
There aren't nearly enough biomes to properly depict the change in height.
The biomes just sort of abruptly start and end, there is no blending between them.
The biomes are assigned purely on the basis of heights, a temperature map overlayed on top of the heightmap would lead to a much more realistic result.
There are no water features other than lakes and oceans in the map, having some rivers could definitly liven up the maps.
The kind of terrain created by the map isn't very consistent, there is a lot more water sometimes, and sometimes very less. Adding more mathematical operations on the raw noise could definitely help with this, however that does require a lot of trial and error.

References

Martin O' Leary's map generator which explores a different and a more realistic approach for creating a map by simulating natural processes.

Amit P's map gen notes, which I have used for voronoi diagrams, graph representaion, and Perlin Noise manipulation.

Asgaar's map generator, which is hands down the best I've seen till date.

Running the project yourself

After cloning the repo, navigate to the root folder, and run the command vendor\premake\premake5.exe vs2019