Day 3

Day One

So I'm starting with the terrain. Experience of building the island says that if I just lay the roads down, they tend to go through mountains a lot. This time I decided to try using a simple 2 step biome to generate my basic map. I created a grasslands with a low heigh multiplier, and a mountain biome with a faster drop off and higher multiplier. Took a bit of tweaking, but generated a basic biome map that looks like this

Which I can then feed into the noise generator and create a general heighmap. The end untextured result looks like this

I kind of like the results, the mountain peaks have more defined ridges it generally looks a lot more like a proper terrain than standard perlin noise. Also, I've build a lot of landscapes using perlin noise. Usually I get good looking islands, but I'm trying to stay away from islands this time. The thought is this will be part of the main land, I might have one corner as water, but thats as far as it goes. Basically I'm just going to generate endless flat planes that match the corners of this map and destroy the roads. If the player wants to drive forever, let them.

So my first two attempts at texturing failed, looks like I will have to get more creative on that. For now, a brown landscape will do, it's not the primary focus anyway, it's just there to feed information to the road layout, and give something for the player to see out the corner of their eye as they drive along.

For generating my roadmap, There's three steps that need to be done. First off, generate a bunch of towns randomly around the map. These simply check that they are up on mountain peaks, and they are distanced a minimum distance apart from each other. 

Then I select one major city kind of near the center of the map at random, and go through randomly deleting other towns. Even though the towns are deleted, the roads will still go to that point. This gives the roads more intersections, and allows the roads to try and work their way around mountains, without me actually having to do many height checks. Those will come later.

So at the end of day 2 I'm getting these kind of spidery connections that look kind of like major roads. From my experiments with the Australia map, as well as looking at the maps for American Truck Simulator, these are kind of similar. A bunch of tweaking is going to be required to get them where I need to be, but it's getting there