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I will be
completing a project-in-lieu-of-a-thesis as part
of the Master's Degree program at the Guildhall.
The purpose of this project is to develop a
toolset that allows for rapid development of
content assets without compromising designer
control.
Gaia features a graph-based user interface
for ease of use. Its primary output is terrain heightmaps, but
it also
includes features for procedurally generating
texture "splats" based on height data and source
textures.
Although I have
had an interest in both procedural content
generation and terrain for some time, and I had
written some simple hard-coded demos of
procedurally generated terrain heightmaps in the
past, the idea of developing a tool for allowing
designers to map the generation of procedural
content came about after using the Unreal Engine
3 material editor. I later discovered that
my idea was not entirely original, as Stephen
Schmitt's
World
Machine operates on the same basic
principles, and I would not be surprised to
learn that
there are other tools in existence which do the
same. My goal with Gaia, however,
is to allow as much control as possible over the
content creation. With this in mind, I
have made some modifications to the basic Perlin
noise and Worley noise algorithms to make them
more user-adjustable, including a spline tool
for defining mountain ridges and valleys along which Perlin
noise will conform.
One of the most
challenging aspects of developing Gaia
has been creating the Windows interface.
Having heard mostly negative remarks regarding
MFC and ATL and being unfamiliar with C#, I
chose to implement the interface using only
Win32 functionality. As a result, I would
estimate that more than half of the development
time on Gaia has been spent not on
developing the content creation tools, but on
constructing and debugging the interface.
Download:
Gaia (Feb. 17, 2007) (9.69 MB, .msi format)
This is the first release candidate of Gaia.
It is feature-complete, with the exception of
documentation, which I am still in the process
of writing, and any bug fixes which I may add in
the future. I welcome users to send any questions, bug
reports, or general feedback to
jpittman
at gmail dot com.
Gaia requires the February 2007 DirectX
End-User Runtime update, which may be download
at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.mspx.
Download:
Project proposal (156 KB, .doc format)
This is the final draft of my field review and
project proposal. |
