simplexnoisemapgenerator

This is an exercise in procedurally generating heightmaps. Leaflet is used to display the results on a webpage.

At this moment it is using two instances of simplex noise at different frequencies to generate heightmap. Biomes are calculated using elevation above sea level and rainfall value generated from another instance of simplex noise.

I am pretty aware this is exactly kind of thing that Node should not be used for - a lot of thread blocking operations. This is just for fun though, and I enjoy writing JavaScript.

Installation

Should be straightforward:

1. Have node.js installed - 6.x or newer is required, 10.x is recommended (it's 2019!)
2. Clone from github
3. Install node-canvas dependencies - see instructions here
   • Windows users: don't be afraid! It does work!
   • Debian (and maybe Ubuntu) users: use libjpeg62-turbo-dev instead of libjpeg8-dev
4. Run npm install
5. Run node index.js
6. Go to http://localhost:3000

You might want to use PM2 to run several instances in parallel to quicker generate the tiles. Running pm2 start index.js -i 0 will start a number of instances equal to the number of available CPU cores at your machine.

Docker

There's an alpine based Dockerfile in repository with Node 10 and PM2 so just docker build . and docker run -p3000:3000 %image% and you should be good to go. It even works fine on Raspberry Pi, although you probably want RPi 4 for this and it still will be struggling.

For reasons unknown (I really don't fancy analyzing node-gyp's idiosyncrasies) building will occasionally fail on compiling native node packages. Just rerun until it succeeds.

It fails 100% of time (sample size = 3) when using a Node 12 base image.

By default PM2 is configured to run on as many cores, as available to docker. To change this setting either update instances in ecosystem.config.js to something else than 0, or use appropriate docker run configuration

Static example

0.0.7

Before Bezier profiling After Bezier profiling (same sea level as above)

0.0.6

Heightmap Biomes

0.0.4

0.0.3

Working example

I have set it up on http://code.michaljarosz.net/demo/simplexnoisemapgenerator. This runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 so do expect poor performance.

Version history

• 0.0.7 - Using bezier curves to alter the distribution of landmass noise, so that it's not all 'mountains in the sea'. The land now rises more gently and mountains are less prominent. Seas should be deeper on average too.
• 0.0.6 - Heightmap now uses a palette taken from Wikipedia map Conventions and boy does it look nice. Also heightmap and biomes layers are both available now and can be switched through UI control. Added a scale control just for fun.
• 0.0.5 - Package updates. Added Dockerfile. No functional changes.
• 0.0.4 - Added biome generation based on Polygonal Map Generation for Game from Red Blob Games article (see below)
• 0.0.3 - First released implementation. Heightmap only

Reading material

• Christian Maher: Working with Simplex Noise
• Polygonal Map Generation for Game from Red Blob Games

License

MIT