Terrain Generation From Rivers
Amit Patel has recently been writing again: this time its about terrain generation that starts with river placement on the coast and works out the rest of the landscape from there. Because he’s working through the project publicly, his weekly posts have both the triumphs and the backtracking. It’s a useful look at some of the practical travails of building a generator.
It’s also a good reminder that there’s more than one way to do things: Amit was inspired by a research paper that sculpted terrain via hydrology. By structuring the data in a new way they could introduce user control in new places.
First post in series: http://www.redblobgames.com/x/1723-procedural-river-growing/
Latest post in the series: http://www.redblobgames.com/x/1729-generate-details/