Killer Game Programming in Java

Chapter 26. Fractal Land

Chapter 25 looked at how to create a realistic setting for a first-person game (a 3D maze). The emphasis was on techniques needed to navigate through the environment, such as multiple views, spotlights, and collision detection. Though the maze's floor was textured, it was quite flat.

This chapter continues the first-person gaming theme but focuses on making the ground more interesting. The terrain can vary from rolling hills to craggy mountains. The key elements of this chapter include:

A fractal landscape

Each time the application begins, a different landscape is generated using a fractal-based algorithm to produce terrain heights. The variation in the heights are controlled by a flatness value entered at the command line when the program is started. The heights are translated into a patchwork of quadrilaterals (quads) which form the landscape.

Figure 26-1 shows two terrains, generated by two separate calls to the application (FractalLand3D ), with different flatness values.

The ground is surrounded by walls, which prevent the user from leaving the terrain area.

Texturing

Each quad is covered with a texture, the choice of texture being determined by the quad's average height. A highly textured object can start to shimmer when viewed from far away since the texture is being mapped to too small an area of screen pixels. I avoid this problem by using minification filtering and mipmapping, which reduce a texture's resolution depending on the viewpoint's distance ...