Project Proposal by Martin Stacey
Geographically Realistic Worlds
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Software |
Object oriented language with good GUI tools, or a game engine |
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Covers |
Programming, possibly interface design or game design |
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Skills Required |
Programming, good knowledge of geography |
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Challenge |
Conceptual Technical Programming |
Brief Description
Many computer games require landscapes for the characters to move around in, or move armies across, or administrate empires in. A number of clever mathematical techniques exist for the procedural generation of terrain that is more or less lumpy, providing hills and lakes, or the coastlines of land masses. However these produce results that don't look much like most of Earth geography, as the physical processes that shape the Earth's landscapes don't behave like the mathematical processes that shape the computationally generated landscapes produced for games.
Your challenge in this project is to develop a program that places key geographic features in a virtual space, and shapes the heights of hills and valleys and other subsidiary or consequent features around them to produce geographically plausible landscapes, for computer games or fantasy stories or just daydreams.
The system would need to combine randomization with mathematical methods for procedural generation of bits of landscape (such as Perlin noise) and discrete decision rules for making choices or enforcing dependencies about which geographical features belong in particular relationships to one another.
Ideally the system should go beyond topography to vegetation. Can you predict or make decisions about weather patterns and determine their influence on where there are forests, grasslands or deserts?
Variants/Extensions
The focus of this project is on sophisticated map generation, not on game design. However, it would be desirable to produce maps that could be imported into a game, or into a game engine, or into an existing program for generating graphic displays of three-dimensional structures.
Much of the character of the system will depend on the scale of the landscapes to be generated, from counties to worlds. For some applications, convincing choices for the shape of coastlines, the combination of islands into archipelagos and the placement of mountain ranges would be plenty and the routes of major rivers a bonus (see Alien Diplomacy). Depending on how the system works, it might be possible to include a mechanism for picking likely locations for towns.
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