Infinite World

jskm

Source

It took about 16 hours, but I managed to stitch multiple maps together with only rare defects on the edges. It looks really good to me, and the errors are likely just because I cut a couple of corners in the smoothing phase of the generation algorithm. Currently the game has no viewport concept, rendering a map per screen and switching maps when you walk off the border. I'm intending to redesign it for smooth scrolling, but that's been more of a challenge. I've been struggling with designing a world model for the game, to abstract away the individual maps and unify location handling.

As for what I might work on next... I could try spawning creatures and giving them basic behaviors. That sounds a bit complicated, though. Useful behavior for NPCs requires giving meaning to spaces in the world, and that might take a while to figure out. I wanted to prototype communication/interaction systems, but combat systems will be easier to get started on, and they don't need particularly intelligent behavior.

Pathfinding could be worth looking at. I just found this blog, which has an interesting approach to roguelike game structure. It's rather different from what I've done so far, though. What I've got right now is an infinite world, so I don't know if Dijkstra maps are feasible.

There are also field-of-view and line-of-sight algorithms. I'm looking at Restrictive Precise Angle Shadowcasting for the FOV algorithm. FastLOS looks interesting; I'd have to implement it to understand what it actually does.

I haven't actually set up an event system, so inter-object communication is kind of limited at the moment. There are also a whole lot of optimization issues. Making the maps larger is very costly and I'll have to rewrite some of the drawing and update routines.

I may also look at increasing terrain complexity, creating more interesting features. Maybe wilderness or town maps as I mentioned before. That's somewhat easier to make visible progress on with the current state of the game. And there are lots of links to terrain generation material. A few such:

On noise:

You might have already seen this one before:
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/
And the more general:
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html
There's this very interesting demo:
http://tinykeep.com/dungen/
With explanation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dlwc4/procedural_dungeon_generation_algorithm_explained/