HACKER Q&A
📣 johnnyApplePRNG

Where to begin learning how to generate procedural worlds?


I want to start writing 3d games, and have no clue where to begin.

Been watching some youtube videos about perlin noise and 3d world generation in three.js and I think I'm starting to grasp the concepts but it's overwhelming atm.

If you can suggest any tutorials or books to read I would greatly appreciate it.


  👤 f0e4c2f7 Accepted Answer ✓
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


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

👤 mrpf1ster
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...



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