Fractal worlds.. possible?

[tismstein]

A world designed from a fractal equation could have endless detail and form possibilities. They're believable too because you can't see where one thing begins and another ends. And wouldn't they be processor friendly because of the limiting of mathematic equations?

Will this be the future of virtual world creation? I'd like to hear opinions.

And here is some inspiration..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sBVdOlyIyI&feature=fvw

[Endoperez]

Check out "procedural" or "algorithmic" terrain etc generation methods. Fractals equations are one subtype of procedural methods, but not the only ones by any means. Fractals also aren't the best possible ones. Lugaru had some sort of procedural terrain - you could run away to the hills, and they'd go on endlessly, but they were plain and featureless so you got lost very quickly.

Dwarf Fortress also uses procedural methods to create huge worlds, and it changes the vegetation and animal life based on humidity, rainfall, erosion, ground height etc. Obviously this high-detail generation isn't done in real-time, and can take quite some time.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/screens.html

Wikipedia has nice video game examples in the procedural generation page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation

[Count Roland]

actually, lugaru didn't have procedural generation for the terrain, it had one large heightmap and a limited view distance with an invisible boundary, if you go into debug mode and the console and type "viewdistance 4" and you should be able to see all the way to the end of the map.

[zoidberg rules]

Am I the only one who thinks that this may well have been another bot incursion?...

I'll look for his other posts...

EDIT: Oh, wait... Preorderer, false alarm, unless bots can preorder... In which case we're all screwed!

Anyway, yes, sorry about the whole thinking you were bot scum and all.

[Count Roland]

actually if bots could pre-order I think wolfire would do quite nicely.

[zoidberg rules]

Yes, but think about it, if bots could choose to buy things, that means they could also choose not to buy them, but to steal them, and that would mean that the human race would suffer greatly as the bots stole all food and drink sources we have!

I'M ON TO YOU TISMSTEIN!

[Assaultman67]

A world designed from a fractal equation could have endless detail and form possibilities. They're believable too because you can't see where one thing begins and another ends. And wouldn't they be processor friendly because of the limiting of mathematic equations?

Will this be the future of virtual world creation? I'd like to hear opinions.

And here is some inspiration..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sBVdOlyIyI&feature=fvw

Fractal equations are redundant in scale ... however, not many games focus on increasing/decreasing scale so they're not used.

Also, what everyone above is referring to is "tiling", which has been used since the dawn of time

They use it for practically everything, textures, heightmaps/bumpmaps etc.



Pretty much every optical trick in the book is used when describing detail ...

Every game is pretty much PACKED with optical illusions

It's actually quite amazing how many "corners" can be cut without degrading the actual look of the game.

[Assaultman67]

Oh shit, I just read over this again and realized no one was really referring to tiling

Now I feel embarrassed, I guess I should read a bit more carefully or that happens.

I was referring to a tiled heightmap, which I have seen on several occassions in different games.

Most noteably Delta Force Land Warrior ...

As for procedural generation, im surprised no one mentioned minecraft

[zoidberg rules]

Ahhh, Minecaft!

How we love you!

[SamW]

Is minecreaft built by a procedural/random heightmap?

Anyways, I think procedural anything would be good to reduce construction time for assets, I see that Wolfire is a huge advocate for procedural stuff because of their limited resources.

Fractals are good for adding detail where you would otherwise have a flat object. such as for texturing and things like that, but I don't see it being used for everything as you really can't control the results other than tweaking the input sets and getting stuff randomly out.

One of the things I did recently was look at and (kind of half-brokenley) helped make an implementation this guy's algorithm for a class. It is interesting if you like want to read about procedural worlds/objects.
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~pmerrell/
Example based model synthesis is simply a smart algorithm that synthesizes different models parts (cubes) together in a consistent manner.
And continuous model synthesis goes beyond tiling together different cubes. And breaks the model down into polyhedral parts that are then used to reconstruct an output.
That is my best horrible explanation. Read the papers.