Platformer Terrain Help

[sudoplaygames]

Platformer Terrain Help

[codetaylor]

The example that I provided is derived directly from the platformer noise example on Joshua Tippetts site. I did not attempt to optimize it at all, I just ported his example to this ported lib.

Joshua says:

There are drawbacks to this method of terrain generation. Generating noise can be fairly slow. It is important to reduce the number of fractals, the octave count of the fractals you do use, and other slow operations as much as possible. Try to re-use fractals when you can, and cache every function that is called more than once. In this example, I was pretty liberal with the use of fractals, providing a separate one for each of the three terrain types. By using ScaleOffset to remap ranges and basing them all on a single fractal, I could have saved myself a lot of processing time.

Additionally, I would not create millions of new Block objects. I would instead create chunk objects that hold a subsection of the blocks as a single dimension byte array and access it using index = x + y * chunkwidth. This would limit you to 256 unique block types (unless you added a second array of nibbles, then you'd max at 4096 block types). Assign each block type a byte ID and create a single Block object for that block type. Then if you need to look up properties of the block, use the ID stored in the chunk array as an index into your Block object list.

To split your generation into chunks you have to sample the noise differently. To sample the noise for my game, I use something similar to the following:

int chunkPosX, chunkPosY; // (0,0), (0,1), etc..
float noiseScale 1.0f/256.0f; // play with the denominator to change scale
float sx, sy, result;
for (int x = 0; x < Chunk.WIDTH; x++) {
  for (int y = 0; y < Chunk.HEIGHT; y++) {
    sx = (x + chunkPosX * Chunk.WIDTH) * noiseScale;
    sy = (y + chunkPosY * Chunk.HEIGHT) * noiseScale;
    result = gen.get(sx,sy);
    ... // do something with result here
  }
}

Just some ideas, hope it helps!

Ok thanks!