Why Procedural Generation?

The last assignment at The Game Assembly Vocational Education for video game programmers is a solo project of personal choice. As I was always interested in procedural generation I decided to delve deeper into the topic. For those unfamiliar, procedural generation is when data is being created using an algorithm instead of doing it manually, which I think is very interesting and cool, especially when the results can be seen visually. For that reason, I chose to procedurally generate a 3D terrain.

Why Unreal Engine 5?

Unreal Engine is a popular and well established engine with a lot of features and documentation, which would help me focus at the task at hand without many limitations. The engine supports visual scripting, which I wanted to try out, but I also wanted to gain experience with an engine so widely used in the game development industry.

Perlin Noise

To achieve a generated terrain with variation in height I used 'Perlin Noise', which is a pseudo-random sequence of numbers that can be visualized with a 2D or 3D texture. In my case, I used one of Unreal Engines workshop add-ons called 'Fast Noise Generator' to generate 2D textures using perlin noise and apply height values to my terrain using the color shade of a coordinate in the texture. Since the perlin texture is blurred/smoothed down, the transitions between the colors are smooth, resulting in a better looking terrain with no sudden sharp changes in height.

Position Based Generation

Instead of generating a predetermined amount of terrain, I wanted to create something more interactive, therefore I decided to generate the terrain based on the players position. I was able to achieve a result where a chunk of terrain is generated when the player moves into a space that's empty.