Fourth-age: Still making noise, dammit!

[Ink]

Fourth-age has just gotten a Procedural Content Generation boost!



I've ported the venerable C++ libnoise library to Python. This is pure Python, but I mainly just want the module logic in Python to make using it from Fourth age more 'Pythonic'. There does exist a Perlin noise generator implemented in Python's C API, so I hope to shortly adopt this and use it instead of a pure Python implementation.

Notice that's no ordinary Perlin noise. libnoise (and now noiselib) works by taking base noise generators, and wrapping the generators in functions which modify the output. Each module taking a set of noise sources acts as another noise source which can in turn be passed to another module. Through this sort of composition complex noise-scapes can be made. The one in the screen shot produces wide-scale terrain with mountain ridges and rolling lowlands. Noise is fractal, so if you zoom in and amplify noise in some small sector then you get noise which resembles that which you zoomed in on (of course, the noise function is not infinite resolution, so you need a high resolution array of noise to do this satisfactorily).

So that's just a little of what Fourth age development has been up to recently. We soon hope to begin moving into more concrete game programming (and not just low level libraries like this).

For the curious, that's an 11 octave, 0.5 persistance ridged-multifractal generator along with a so-called 'billow noise' generator at 8 octaves and 0.75 persistance and scaled to 0.125 and biased by -0.75 then blended to the ridged multifractal generator using that generator itself as the control value for the blend lerp (the ridged multifractal is the '1' end of the lerp scale). That way the ridges stay sharp and as the height drops the rolling effect of the billow noise become more pronounced.

[Fantomen]

And what is fourth age?

[Gregstrom]

The Dom3 roguelike spinoff, I think.

[NTJedi]

Wow... looks like the creator of this thread Ink was recently banned. Could it have been related to this topic?

[Gandalf Parker]

Bring him back.
He is NOT my alt!
He will be good. Really.

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

Wow... looks like the creator of this thread Ink was recently banned. Could it have been related to this topic?

Hardly this topic, but I'm not surprised.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

Wow... looks like the creator of this thread Ink was recently banned. Could it have been related to this topic?

No. He was the sockpuppet of a user banned for piracy. That's all there is to it.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Edi

No. He was the sockpuppet of a user banned for piracy. That's all there is to it.

That's not quite true. He was the sockpuppet of a user banned for pointing out piracy existed with a little too much evidence. IMO, his banning was a little excessive (a warning and deleting the link from the offending post would have been sufficient), but I am not a moderator, so what do i know.

[Foodstamp]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

That's not quite true. He was the sockpuppet of a user banned for pointing out piracy existed with a little too much evidence. IMO, his banning was a little excessive (a warning and deleting the link from the offending post would have been sufficient), but I am not a moderator, so what do i know.

Do you or have you ever used IRC? If so why should we believe a word you have typed?

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

That's not quite true. He was the sockpuppet of a user banned for pointing out piracy existed with a little too much evidence. IMO, his banning was a little excessive (a warning and deleting the link from the offending post would have been sufficient), but I am not a moderator, so what do i know.

His "little too much evidence" was active links?
It seems as if the punishments for such is fairly standard.
Doing it in some rare forums and channels might get you praised.
Doing it in fan-run forums and channels might get you slapped.
Doing it on the official distributor owned and run forum or chat tends to get you banned.