Infinite Fun Space

On-the-fly procedurally generated interactive worlds

The worlds in the snapshots on this page were all procedurally generated in real time using OpenGL on an 800MHz PC with a GeForce3 graphics card running Linux. Other than the tree bitmaps, none of the data is pre-generated -- the land heights and object placements are all created on the fly as the camera moves about the world. Objects are created and removed when they are only a few pixels in size.

In most of these snapshots, the camera is around two meters above the ground. The visible horizon is 100 kilometers away and extends as needed as the camera moves. The world is a square, in theory more than 4 million kilometers on a side with 1 meter resolution, though in practice, this implementation is limited by floating point precision to approximately a 1,000 km radius about the starting position.

This application also contains a discrete event physics simulator which will eventually be tied into the animation of objects in the landscape.

My dissertation can be downloaded here.

May 8, 2002