Bear Studios

At first we thought of using terrain view of google maps to generate terrain, so the player will feel more fun playing the game. After some discussion with Allan we finally dropped the idea of using google map’s terrain view since it is not a height map nor a gradient map, so it will be hard to gather useful information from terrain view map and generate a game world out of it.

Secondly we thought of using the GIS(Geographic Information Systems) data. However, since we are intending to implement the game onto Xbox 360, and a good set of  GIS data are usually quite huge, memory on xbox might not be enough.

The third suggested option was to use diamond-square algorithm to randomly generate a terrain. Basically it is an algorithm to randomly generate a height map that the neighboring points are not very far off.  After a few parses the height map was quite a decent one as show below.

The last option was to randomly generate some points at fixed intervals and using bezier curvesto interpolate the points in between + Perlin noise  to generate the terrain. This is an interesting option as it could also be used along with Geographical Mip Mapping where terrains further away are interpolated with less points making real time rendering a lot cheaper.

the result of using diamond-square random map generation. Everytime it generates a new map that looks natural.