Fractal Coordinates for Incremental Procedural Content Generation
Peter A. Mawhorter · 2021
Incremental procedural content generation (IPCG) has been used in games such as Minecraft to provide a unique flavor of gameplay, but requires that parts of the world can be generated independently of one another in any order and will always fit together in the end. Noise functions such as simplex noise are a very popular building block for IPCG systems, because they support this property, but noise functions alone have their limitations, one of which being an inability to create non-local structures or continuity. To combat this, noise functions are usually applied at several scales to provide fractal continuity and recognizable features similar to real world geography’s fractal complexity. This paper describes a system of fractal coordinates suitable for use with IPCG that generalize this idea of multiple layers of structure at different scales, and demonstrates how it can be used to achieve some interesting effects.