Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen • Hacker News Board

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#21

Post by Cristan » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 11:27 AM UTC

nxobject wrote: post #16

bcraven wrote: post #2

To my geologist's eyes there is a fundamental flaw in this method: the assumption of randomness. All mountain ranges are driven up by lateral forces, so simply look on a satellite image to notice how they are made of ranges[0]. I do wonder if this propensity can be introduced to the code. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains#/media/File...

In general, are aware of any physically-based long-term geological process models with real life fidelity as a goal, and that have a remote chance of being feasible for gamedev? I imagine that, analogous to work done in weather forecasting, someone can shove DEM files into the pattern-matching engine of an AI, but I do wonder how feasible a completely algorithmic model will be.

Not sure if this is what you're asking, but take a look at Terra Firma on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482770/Terra_Firma/

I don't know what tech they're using, but it does have erosion, water flow and sediments, plus others. I see they're planning a paid version with more features this year. I've only played an alpha some time ago, but it should be possible to export the maps to use in other programs.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#22

Post by baq » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

bcraven wrote: post #2

To my geologist's eyes there is a fundamental flaw in this method: the assumption of randomness. All mountain ranges are driven up by lateral forces, so simply look on a satellite image to notice how they are made of ranges[0]. I do wonder if this propensity can be introduced to the code. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains#/media/File...

You generally start with some kind of perlin noise and then add plate tectonics e.g. with voronoi diagrams (use anything you want), then add climate, erosion etc. however many passes you like. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#23

Post by jonhohle » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

This reminds me of terrains Bryce (with its wonderful Kai Krause interface) would generate. I had no idea Ken Musgrave, who created the algorithms, was a student of Mandelbrot. I had always assumed Bryce used Perlin noise, but it turns out I was wrong and it was using fractals.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#24

Post by baq » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #11

Stop using Perlin noise and use Simplex noise, or something even better, instead. We've come up with much, much better random noise generators in the last forty years, there's really no excuse to still use Perlin, especially in a setting where grid-aligned artifacts are going to end up in your geometry. It's a "learning about noise" algorithm, not a "using it for reals" algorithm.

Ultimately the goal is to make something good looking, how does a different noise algorithm matter? IOW why simplex generates better height maps than perlin?

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#25

Post by ryanwhitney » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

mudkipdev wrote: post #7

The AI generated images littered everywhere on the website makes it look childish.

I have no idea why people do this. To me, it only serves to devalue the rest of the content.

It’s especially egregious in this case because the post is about something visual. The art is built-in! Why oh why.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#26

Post by TimorousBestie » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #24

TheRealPomax wrote: post #11

Stop using Perlin noise and use Simplex noise, or something even better, instead. We've come up with much, much better random noise generators in the last forty years, there's really no excuse to still use Perlin, especially in a setting where grid-aligned artifacts are going to end up in your geometry. It's a "learning about noise" algorithm, not a "using it for reals" algorithm.

Ultimately the goal is to make something good looking, how does a different noise algorithm matter? IOW why simplex generates better height maps than perlin?

Parent basically says it but Perlin noise tends to generate spatial correlations that don’t look uniform. Simplex noise doesn’t.

On the practical level, Simplex noise is also faster and generalizes to n-dimensional noise easier.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#27

Post by poeticLLama » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

Looks pretty cool, p5js: https://p5js.org/reference/p5/noise/ supports Perlin noise out of the box.

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#28

Post by jampa » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

ProcGen is a fun rabbit hole to play with and was a hobby for a whole year while I tried building my own game.

I think the best material out there was from Red Blob Games (developer of the original Realm of the Mad God), which has some old but very complete material on procedural generation, including adding rivers, biomes, using Perlin noise and Voronoi polygons

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#29

Post by bbkane » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

bcraven wrote: post #2

To my geologist's eyes there is a fundamental flaw in this method: the assumption of randomness. All mountain ranges are driven up by lateral forces, so simply look on a satellite image to notice how they are made of ranges[0]. I do wonder if this propensity can be introduced to the code. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains#/media/File...

I think https://veloren.net/ has contributors who have put a lot of work into simulation geology, but I can't recall the place I read that

Re: Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

#30

Post by antonkar » Sat, Mar 08, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

Game developers can potentially save the world right now, we can build the Artificial Static Place Intelligence – instead of creating AI/AGI agents that are like librarians who only give you quotes from books and don’t let you enter the library itself to read the whole books. Why not expose the whole library – the entire multimodal language model – to real people, for example, in a computer game?

To make this place easier to visit and explore, we could make a digital copy of our planet Earth and somehow expose the contents of the multimodal language model to everyone in a familiar, user-friendly UI of our planet.

We should not keep it hidden behind the strict librarian (AI/AGI agent) that imposes rules on us to only read little quotes from books that it spits out while it itself has the whole output of humanity stolen.

We can explore The Library without any strict guardian in the comfort of our simulated planet Earth on our devices, in VR, and eventually through some wireless brain-computer interface (it would always remain a game that no one is forced to play, unlike the agentic AI-world that is being imposed on us more and more right now and potentially forever)