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Killer Game Programming in Java
book

Killer Game Programming in Java

by Andrew Davison
May 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
998 pages
26h
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Killer Game Programming in Java

Other Fractal Landscapes

Aside from the plasma fractal used in my code, two other popular approaches are the fault fractal and the Fractal Brownian Motion (FBM) fractal.

A fault fractal creates a height map by drawing a random line through a grid and increasing the height values on one side of the line. If this is repeated several hundred times then a reasonable landscape appears. The main drawbacks are the lack of programmer control over the finished product and the length of time required to produce a convincing geography.

An FBM fractal is a combination of mathematical noise functions which generate random height values within a certain range. An important advantage of FBM is that each noise function has several parameters which can be adjusted to alter its effect. C++ code for creating clouds and landscapes with FBMs can be found in the article by Jesse Laeuchi: "Programming Fractals" from Games Programming Gems 2, section 2.8, pp.239-246, 2001.

A good online starting point for fractal terrain information is the Virtual Terrain Project page (http://www.vterrain.org/Elevation/artificial.html).

The j3d.org code repository (http://code.j3d.org) has an extensive set of packages related to terrain creation. There's a FractalTerrainGenerator class in org.j3d.geom.terrain that uses a plasma fractal approach similar to mine in which the heights are generated and converted to geometry with ElevationGridGenerator. Colors are assigned per vertices based on ramp values specified in ColorRampGenerator ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007302Supplemental ContentErrata Page