Thomas Conway wrote:
To amuse myself while waiting for test-runs to complete, I was thinking about random terrain generation. I came across a bunch of nice posts by Torben Mogensen, where he describes a neat way of constructing random terrains by recursively subdividing right angled isosceles triangles. It got me thinking - it's all well and good subdividing to give more detail as you zoom in, but what about when you zoom out?
Can you post a hyperlink for an exact description of the algorithm?
This got me thinking that it would be cool to make an infinite terrain generator using a zipper, so you can zoom in/out infinitely, and by implication, infinitely in any direction.
An infinite random terrain sounds like great fun :) I can't say whether it's possible or whether zippers are needed without knowing the details, though. One problem is probably having a "point of reference", i.e. one needs a point (0,0) with a fixed height 0. In the bounded case, one has a rectangle to subdivide instead. Regards, apfelmus