Procedural Terrain Generator

Procedural generation is a technique that is often used within games to generate dungeons, levels, and terrains, etc., the use of which can be traced as far back as 1980. Originally, this was primarily used due to the hardware limitations of the time and the desire to make games that were not overly strenuous on the system. However, as technology has improved, so has the demand for higher quality game worlds. In order to fulfil this demand, most games nowadays opt for manual, hand-crafted terrains, over those generated procedurally. The aim of this project was to investigate the use of procedural terrain generation techniques to determine how these techniques can be applied to games released more recently and whether this is still a viable option for game development. To achieve this aim, a prototype application was developed to demonstrate 4 PCG techniques for the generation of realistic, mountainous terrains. The 4 techniques that were explored in this project are marching cubes, the diamond-square algorithm, thermal erosion, and hydraulic erosion. These techniques were thoroughly researched before their implementation and the resulting terrains were extensively tested and evaluated to determine if they are of the standard set by games released within the last 5 years. The results of this experiment concluded that while each of these algorithms have both positive and negative aspects to them, overall, they show potential and with the proper implementation and rendering, could produce a near infinite number of high-quality game worlds.