Hey there. I’ve finally finished my exams and started working more on the engine. These last days I’ve been working on adding some clouds to the sky. I wanted the clouds to be animated and also to allow for more or less coverage of the sky. To get these features I thought about using procedurally generated content. They allow you to change the mood of a game by just tweaking some parameters. The basic building block of procedural content is noise. Not true random noise, but what is known as coherent noise.
Coherent noise
This type of noise is generated by interpolating between random values. The most known type of coherent noise is Perlin noise. It was created by Ken Perlin in 1985 and is used in all sorts of things in the special effects movie industry. By manipulating this noise we can generate clouds, water, fire, grass, planets, well, pretty much everything.
So the first step was creating a Noise class in the engine. After this was done I added support for animated clouds in the sky system component. I didn’t tweak it yet, but I’m already quite pleased with the results.
There are still some seams in the sky, probably due to badly generated sphere texture coordinates. If someone knows how to do spherical mapping properly, I’d love if you could give me some tips on how to get it perfect. In the future I’ll work on some animated water, but it’s going to be a lot of work to do it properly, since I want to base it on splines, instead of the usual “water planes”. That will be more flexible and allow curved rivers and also waterfalls. Take care.
