This (currently, still nameless) project is going to be a simulator for tribes / peoples moving around a procedurally generated map and generally interacting with each other. This idea was something I wanted to do for a while, but was heavily influenced by a YouTube Shorts video I saw on Hunnic migrations!
This is also very much a Rust study project; before this, I had never dealt with image generation, noise functions or multithreading, and I expect to deal with other concepts moving forward.
This idea is based on two modules of sorts - a map generator, which I am currently working on, and the simulator itself, which will use a randomly generated map.
As of March 2024, I am still simply generating noise-based maps, without any advanced image processing techniques. I did begin using nannou in order to facilitate outputting an image to screen, whereas before I saved each generated image instead of displaying it.
Currently I plan on converting the code to run via WebGPU, in order to facilitate faster iterations, then adding other features such as rivers. This noise-based approach is still just a study path, however, as I intend to use other methods to generate realistic, planet-spanning terrain.
If you want to try the project in its current shabby form, you'll need Rust
installed on your machine. The project itself can be run directly with cargo run, which will use default values, but you can specify a bunch of stuff with
command line arguments (courtesy of the clap crate!). You can do cargo run -- --help to see what arguments are available so far. I haven't tested the code on
anything other than x86-64 Linux, however.