Making maps with noise functions (2022)

written Jul 2015, then updated in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 One of the more popular pages on my site is about polygonal map generation[1]. Making those maps was a lot of work. I didn’t start there. I started with something much simpler, which I’ll describe here. The simpler technique can make maps like this in under 50 lines of code: I’m not going to explain how to draw these maps; that’s going to depend on your language, graphics library, platform, etc. I’m only going to explain how to fill an array with height and biome map data. Noise # A common way to generate 2D maps is to use a bandwidth-limited noise function, such as Simplex or Perlin noise, as a building block. This is what the noise function looks like: We assign each location on the map a number from 0.0 to 1.0. In this image, 0.0 is black and 1.0 is white. Here’s how to set the color at each grid location in C-like syntax: for (int y = 0; y < height; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < width; x++) { double nx = x/widt ... Read full article.