2d terrain generation in real time

Question

Hey,

I'm trying to create a game similar to this (Note:When you click 'play', there are SFX in the game which you can't seem to turn off, so you may want to check volume). In particular, I'm interested in knowing how the 'infinite' landscape is generated. Are there any tutorials/articles describing this? I came across procedural generation, but I'm not quite sure what topics I should be looking for (or if it's even procedural generation).

(I'm using C#, but I don't mind the language as I assume the theory behind it remains the same)

Thanks for any suggestions

Answer 1

That one seems like it would be pretty easy to duplicate -- I would imagine an algorithm that calculates the next "step" of the landscape (the part that is off the screen). It would need to know the prior height (and maybe even the previous slope) in order to then (randomly) increment or decrement the step. You could then tweak the algorithm to be more fluid (gently sloping), or extreme (whipsawing back and forth) as time passes/levels are completed.

Before I clicked the link though, I thought you might have been talking about voxel landscapes -- which I haven't thought about for over a dozen years, but amazed me when I first saw them. I did some googling, and thought you might be interested in this:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article655.asp

(Not sure if the Mars demo still exists, or if anyone has a DOS machine to play it on, but this is a good example that shows what it used to look like: http://www.codermind.com/articles/Voxel-terrain-engine-building-the-terrain.html )