2D Terrain Generation Archives - Page 2 of 2

Week 6 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Collision Detection, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / July 6, 2020

Grass And Sand Details — Image showing the detail tiles for the grass and sand

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the generation of the 2D map for the game. I decided it was a lot of extra work, working out all the special cases. So, I decided to simplify the map and make a smoothing algorithm. I basically am checking anywhere on the map where a tile is surrounded by another color tile or where 3 sides are surrounded by another color tile. If that is the case, then I replace the tile with the color around it. As far as I can tell this seems to eliminate some of the special cases and allows me to make less tiles. It basically removes any areas where there was a single tile jutting out into another color. It also eliminated areas where a single tile was inside another area. For instance, one sand tile in the grass area.

I also did some work on collision detection. I added the code for collision detection of tiles by adding a Boolean variable to check if the player is moving into a certain tile. For now, I tested it using water tiles. So, the player could not walk into the water. I disabled it for testing the rest of the map generation for now. But, in the future I will use the collision detection function to test entities on the map like trees, rocks, stumps, etc. I plan on working on implementing some of that work this coming week. I will also be working on an entities class that will use similar collision detection to the tiles.

Game Art Work:

Water Tiles Animated Separated — Image showing the different tiles that would be used for the water tile animation

This week I decided to work on some Animated Water Tiles. I was able to get them very close to the way I think I want them. The only thing that is bothering me is that the water would only animate in one direction. This can be seen below. If the image is not animated click on the image and you should be able to see the animation. I may want to change that in the future.

I also worked on adding some grass and sand details. If you look at the map image at the top, you can see some of the grass and flower detail tiles. I only worked on details that would not need collision with the player. In the near future I will add animated grass and other interactable tiles. I added a few sand details, but I would like to add some shells or other objects to make it look better and have the player be able to interact with these as well. For now, the details are just picked at random from tiles that are not edges. But I will probably work on a different algorithm for placing these better and in clumps. More than likely I will need to use an algorithm for a cellular automata for this.

Work Planned for the Upcoming Week:

I want to work on coding the Animated Tile Class. Then I should be able to implement the animated water tiles to the map generation. Additionally, I would like to work on elevation change tiles that I can use to change heights on the map. I would also like to create an entities class that can be used for interactable objects like stumps, tall grass, etc. In order to accomplish this I believe I need another rendering system for these as they will be above the map tiles. I have a lot of coding ahead of me and probably a lot of error checking, but I am hopeful that I can complete this work this week. Until next time.

Week 6 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Week 5 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Perlin Noise, Tile Assets / admin / June 28, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the generation of the 2D map for the game. I spent a lot more time working on coding the edge checking system. Currently I have pretty much figured out how to make it work. I have a few special cases that I seem to be finding that I did not check for. One is featured in the image below that shows if the edge is closer to another edge it does not know to handle it properly. It only finished the edge on one side. The error is just above the character to the left. To fix this I need to add art assets for each case and check it in the code. Currently I also have most of the grass edge working. I need to finish checking some of the special cases just like in the water section.

Water Tile Special Cases — Water Edge Tile bug that will be fixed soon

After the edge system is done for the water and grass, I need to work on the other sections with edges. In the future I want to change the water tile and make it animate. I also don’t want the tile to just be blue water. Also, soon I want to add more detailed tiles to the map to make it look much more interesting.

In the map generation right now, I marked an area in dark green that would be the denser forest area. The dense forest would be made up of much denser tree placement and taller grass and shrubs. Some of these areas would be inaccessible without cutting the objects down. I also marked out terrain with a grey area for mountains and a white area for snow. In these areas I want it to look like they are a higher elevation and I believe that I will be able to make it look higher using edge sprites. Instead of replacing the edge with a one tile change, I would need to probably use at least 2 tiles to make it look like it is higher up. Also, once I add collision the player would not be able to just walk into these areas without a ladder or ramp or something.

Water and Grass Edge Done — Water and Grass Edges are working for the most part.

Future Game Engine Work:

I would like to add elevation changes to other areas as well down the road. I have been thinking a lot about what I would like to have in the game, and I think I would like to have cave entrances spawn on the map in the elevated areas. Then if you enter a cave, I could generate a below ground map that would resemble caving and dungeon exploration. I think by adding this element it would make the game much more interesting and would make the game very repayable due to all the procedural generation changing every time you play the game.

Furthermore, I started thinking that maybe most of the enemies on the surface will be forest animals. I really enjoy nature and wildlife photography so I figure a game with wild animals would be cool. To start I would like to implement some animals that would be non-aggressive and others that would attack the player. I would probably start with sprites for bears, wolves, rabbits, and foxes. I think it would be real fun if the player could tame these animals or trap them. But this work would be something that I am no where near ready to implement.

For now, I think I am going to focus heavily on the procedural generation of the world. Then I will work more on the game play aspects. It has taken me longer than I thought it would to figure out how to calculate all the edge checks, but I am starting to get the hang of it. The next step is to try using cellular automata or another method to produce more random placement of detailed tiles. Then I would like to work on the elevation changes.

Game Art Work:

Over the period of the week I worked a lot getting the proper tiles for all the edge cases. With the grass edge I was able to use less tiles because of the way I created the tile set. So, it was easier to complete than the water. I will most likely use the new method to complete the other areas, so I don’t have to make as many assets. Other than making a few edge tiles I really did not work much on art assets this week. I want to add more randomness to all areas on the map because currently the blank colors are boring. So, this week I will work on adding more detail tile sprites to each area. Once there is more randomization the map will start to look a lot more interesting.

In the future I would like to add a rivers and path system. So, I will need to create art assets for this as well. The other problem I might encounter is if a river intersects with an elevation change. In that case I would need tiles that look like a waterfall to now throw of the aesthetic. I am sure that I will encounter all kinds of problems as I work on this, but I am hoping I can figure them all out and make everything work as intended.

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Week 4 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / June 21, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the random generation of the 2D map for the game. Initially I was working on coding an edge checking system that would take each grid square of the map and determine if it was shallow water. Then it would check each of those grid squares neighbors “left, up, right, down” to determine if it had an edge with sand or not. Once I got those edge cases working for the shallow water and sand edge, I realized I would need to figure out a corner checking system because the map currently is missing edges in some cases. I still have not worked on that problem yet. It will be the next part I work on. The image below shows the corner cases being bugged currently. The program does not know yet to check the corner case and add a different tile to complete the edge.

From there I also worked on a sand and grass edge check. I was able to get that all set up to the same point as the prior. So, I just need to figure out the corner checks and add the sprites for that. I am confident that I will be able to figure out the corner cases soon and once I have them working, I will most likely move to complete all the edge cases for the different areas on the map.

Game Art Work:

Over the period of the week I worked a lot on trying to create the tile set for the water and sand edge. Each time I thought I was finished it would not line up correctly. I was not sure if I had an issue in my code or the art. It turned out I believe to be the art. After trying so many different looks I just stuck with a very basic one for now. The initial art I worked on had to many bends in it and looked very unnatural, so I scrapped it. I know in the future I want to animate the water and have the water look more like water.

WaterEdge and Grass Edge Tiles — Tile set for the water edge and grass edge

After spending a lot of hours treading water on the art, I decided on focusing on getting the edge in the sprite to line up correctly. So, I worked only on the edges between colors. Most of the tiles are just the solid color from the map with the edge change. Once I had a pattern for the water tile, I created a simple tile set for the grass edge with the sand using the same technique. I am just using these for testing, and I will work more on the art later. I just decided I was spending to much time on the art, and I was not getting anywhere with the actual game work. So, for now I am creating basic art assets to use for testing the code. I can always modify the art later.

Thoughts:

I know this is a relatively short article for this week’s progress but not much progress was made on the game because I spent to much time on the art. I’m looking forward to getting back on track this week. I would like to have all the edge testing done by the end of the week including the corner cases. Then I will need to move into adding rivers, vegetation, and terrain height changes which I anticipate will be harder for me to figure out.

Let me know what you think of the work so far, and if you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

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Week 3 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / June 14, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the generation of the 2D map for the game. I decided for now to take out the moisture map and solely base the map generation on a Perlin noise map of different heights. I set thresholds for areas of water, sand, grass, dense forest, desert, and snow. Most likely I am going to change the desert to mountains or rocky terrain. That way this part of the generation is determining the type of area it is, but not the Biome. For now, the map is not determined by other factors such as how much rain occurs in the area. The moisture map will most likely be needed to determine more Biomes and river generation in the future.

I wanted to simplify the map as much as possible for now so I could work on the edge cases between different types of tiles. I did not want it to just look like squares of color with nothing to break up the edges. You can see what the map currently looks like in the short video above. In the video you can see several of the different terrain types. Including 2 colors of water, sand, grass, and a tile I am currently using to represent a dense forest area. It is just a grass block for now. I decided to have 2 water colors to show the deeper water areas. I may use this for adding fishing to the game in the future. Where certain fish come from only deep water.

In the future I would like the map to have different heights in all the landmass areas. So, I need to figure out a way to randomly generate elevation change in the tiles, so they don’t look out of place. I only want a couple of levels of height, so the map does not look so flat. I will also need to figure out how I am going to handle river generation. Furthermore, I will need to work on adding trees, brush, and other objects like ores to the map. I am going to be looking at Poisson disk sampling to do those parts of the map generation.

Map Generation Next Steps:

The next steps of the map generation, is to figure out how to manage the transitions between the various regions. For instance, between the water and the beach there would need to be a tile in between that has both water and sand to break up the flat look. The same would need to happen for every area that has an edge between two terrain types.

I believe that the following cases would need to be checked for a tile that has two terrain types around it. The lighter tiles would be one terrain type and the darker tiles would be another. The X marks show tiles that we would not care about during each tile check.

Edge Cases Figure — The Figure showing edge cases of tiles

The center tile in each case is the one you are testing to see whether it has neighbors that are not of the same type. The different cases above would need to have art assets for each specific case. From what I have been able to find on the subject I need to have art asset tiles that would look like the image below. So, each case above matches up with the art asset below.

Edge Cases Art Figure — Shows the different art assets that would need to be made for each edge case.

Game Art Work:

This week I worked on coloring the main character sprite. I was trying to make the character look like a ranger. I wanted the outfit to be dark green with leather accents. So, for now I made the clothes a dark green with a brown leather belt. I used a lighter green to highlight some areas. Most likely I will take the black out of the forward-facing hair because it does not fit with the rest of the directions. It just looks funny to me. The main character in the game will probably start out with nothing or just very basic weapons. Currently the character movement is working but I need to create assets for weapons, and assets for different attack animations for the character.

Main Character Sprite Sheet Color — The Colored Main Character Sprite Sheet

I also worked on some water / grass edge tiles. I think it is a good start, but I may need to change them. Once I start working on the edge cases I may decide that these tiles look to detailed for what I am going for. I also started work on the water/ sand edge tiles, but I am not done with them yet. This week I am going to try and focus on finishing the edge tiles and getting all the basic tiles done so the map can start looking like something.

Water Edge Tiles So Far — Water Edge tiles done so far

Week 3 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Start of 2D Terrain Generation and Perlin Noise

Leave a Comment / 2D Terrain Generation, Perlin Noise / admin / May 28, 2020

Initially when I started working with Perlin noise I was using grey scale values to display elevation. So the darker the area the lower the elevation. I also played around with smoothing the noise. The smoother the noise the less differentiation occurs in the height. But I figured for now I wanted to show more on one screen. Check out the images below for the different maps.

Since I currently do not have a chunk loading system or any way to move around the map, I have no way to test generating more than one screen worth of data. In the future I want to have a chunk loading system in place. Initially I would load 9 chunks of the map. The center map where the player is and its 8 neighbor chunks. Then as the character moves I would need to load and unload chunks from memory. This may lead to some problems with the edges of the chunks not matching up with terrain height and biome type. I am not sure of that until I get to that point. I have not started work on the chunk system yet but I think it is one of my next steps.

So, my initial maps just show different noise levels in grey scale. Then I added some color in the next maps to show that water would be the lowest elevation, then sand for beaches, then grass was green, and the grey area for mountains, and white for snow caps. From there I moved onto generating another noise map for moisture levels. I had to use another random seed of noise so the maps were not identical. Then I also changed the increment to smooth out the moisture differently than the elevation map. Most of which will change again once I can produce smaller sections of the overall map using chunks. Once I had both maps setup I merged the outputs together into my algorithm. Then I created different biomes based on the elevation and the moisture level at a specific location. I gave a specific color to each biome. Then I started to get some weird outputs. It took a long time before I realized that I was not adding the different octaves of the noise. Octaves are the number of levels of detail you want your Perlin noise to have. I was only generating one level. Now that I am using a higher number of octaves and adding them together, I am getting a much better result.

Current Biomes:

The biomes currently are: ocean / water, beach, scorched earth, bare, tundra, temperate desert, shrubland, grassland, temperate deciduous forest, temperate rain forest, subtropical desert, tropical seasonal forest, tropical rain forest, snow, and taiga. Each biome is represented by a different color on the map. I may raise or lower the number of biomes in the future. For now this was for testing purposes.

In the near future I am probably going to add more layers of abstraction to the final map. I need a way to produce rivers effectively as well as a way to place trees, bushes, stones, and other objects. I also would like to add a temperature / latitude map to make biomes limited by the temperature as well. This may be harder because I want the map to load dynamically. I will most likely have to determine what the max map size would be in order to add poles and equators. Then I would need a system to chose the starting point of the map, so that the player was not always starting in a specific biome or temperature based solely on the latitude. I also need to work on the system of not only generating the terrain data but then taking that data and translating each pixel to a tile. Currently my maps are not very detailed and don’t include all the data. But, I think I will start working on the basic system to going from a pixel map of colors to a map of tiles that will most likely be 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels tall. I may make it 32 but I have not decided yet.

I have worked a lot so far this week on the noise generation for the maps. But I will also continue to work on some art for the game. I have been working on the character art but I still have to finish the front and back views in grey scale before I move to coloring the character. I also need to work on more tiles for the map. Including more ground tiles for different biomes. Tiles for rock, snow, water, etc. I will also need to work on a tile system and an animated tile system. The game is in such early stages that I basically need to build everything, and as I do I will be adding the progressions here.

Screenshots of the map work so far:

Smooth Perlin Noise Gray Scale — Smoother Perlin Noise

Start of 2D Terrain Generation and Perlin Noise Read More »