Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen

Image generated by DALL-E, OpenAI Procedural generation is everywhere—you’ve probably encountered it without even realising. It’s what gives in-game worlds their rolling hills, jagged cliffs, and winding cave systems. And at the heart of it all is Perlin noise: a special kind of randomness that isn’t entirely random at all. It’s smooth where it needs to be, rough when we want it to be, and endlessly customizable. But what exactly is procedural generation? In simple terms, it’s a method of creating natural looking textures and objects using algorithms instead of manually designing every detail. Take Minecraft as an example. Every time you load up a new world, you’re presented with an entirely unique landscape. These worlds aren’t designed by hand (think of the poor interns). Instead they’re built using procedural generation. Unlike traditional, handcrafted environments, procedural generation lets us create massive, complex landscapes on the fly—often with just a few lines of code. I ... Read full article.