Ask HN: Where to begin learning how to generate procedural worlds?

Author: johnnyApplePRNG

Score: 19

Comments: 11

Date: 2021-12-04 17:37:24

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f0e4c2f7 wrote at 2021-12-05 00:15:34:

I've been doing a deep dive on the unreal engine 5 beta. It's absolutely incredible and 10x easier to use than when I've tried in the past.

I used this tutorial to get started.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gQmiqmxJMtA

Following along with the tutorial I felt not that far from something that I could release as a playable game. Really fun to use.

Unreal engine has an extremely rich plugin ecosystem with dozens of procedural plugins.

So for example:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/world...

I haven't found something that feels comprehensive yet. But it's probably because I'm not familiar enough with the space. You can cobble it all together with the plugins though. Unfortunately, unlike traditional software development the unreal plugins tend to cost money (or good news if you have an interest in plugin development). Unreal Engine on the other hand is free up to some crazy amount of sales and then you pay a small royalty.

There is also another program I ran across that I think can import to unreal and other software.

https://www.world-creator.com/

Oh and here's a shorter video of some of the unreal engine 5 stuff that highlight the technical updates.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d1ZnM7CH-v4

johnnyApplePRNG wrote at 2021-12-05 03:24:36:

I like the way that first video starts out. I can tell already I'm going to watch the entire series. Thank you so much!

Just curious... can unreal create games that can be played in the browser?

f0e4c2f7 wrote at 2021-12-05 13:07:11:

You know I'm not sure. It's pretty versatile so maybe? I've been focused on VR dev.

Googling it looks like at least some people are.

https://itch.io/games/made-with-unreal-engine/platform-web

manx wrote at 2021-12-04 22:08:59:

Some hopefully useful keywords: iso surface, marching cubes, dual contouring, octree, kd-tree, perlin noise, worley noise, level of detail

johnnyApplePRNG wrote at 2021-12-05 03:14:57:

I have come across a number of those terms in the past few days, so I must be on the right track!

mrpf1ster wrote at 2021-12-04 22:20:31:

Sebastian Lague has a bunch of videos on youtube about creating games and 3d worlds. I saw him described as the “Bob Ross” of programming and I agree wholeheartedly.

Creating Virtual Planets:

https://youtu.be/lctXaT9pxA0

Creating Terrain:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFt_AvWsXl0eBW2EiBtl_sxmD...

johnnyApplePRNG wrote at 2021-12-05 03:17:33:

That's funny. I have seen no less than 2 other youtubers be described as the bob ross of programming in the past few days... and they were all creating procedural worlds!

Came across Lague but have not checked him out yet. I will now, thanks!

RobRivera wrote at 2021-12-04 18:25:43:

your local random number generation library and an understanding of seeding and number distributions

aww_dang wrote at 2021-12-04 18:22:31:

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

amitp wrote at 2021-12-04 19:27:10:

That's more of an intermediate level; I think

https://www.redblobgames.com/maps/terrain-from-noise/

is a simpler place to get started. For concepts ("frequency", "octaves", etc.), see

https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/noise/introduction.htm...

but I would recommend starting with the practical page and then reading the theory page afterwards.

Also, there's a procedural generation reddit (

https://old.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/

) which has resources in the sidebar and there's also a procedural generation discord

https://discord.gg/67yD223

aww_dang wrote at 2021-12-05 06:26:43:

Thanks for all of the resources.