5 hours ago, frob said:Historically in the late 80's and early 90's many projects relied on fractals because they had tiny resource requirements up front. Many demoscene programs relied on fractals for long-running visuals.
Reminds me about kkrieger - all procedural, entire game in 96 kb:
4 hours ago, Gnollrunner said:I have my voxel planet generator but I'd like to put trees on it. I'm not going for ultra realistic trees, however I don't want blocky trees either. I'm targeting something like older game trees like you find in WoW. The problem with voxels is, to get something reasonably detailed you need a fairly high voxel density, much higher than you need for terrain. That takes a lot of memory.
IMHO people are assuming too much clever technicality is always required and are thereby lumbering themselves with huge processing, memory and performance requirements.
I too have a terrain generator, essentially infinite in extent, with trees and many other objects on it. All in about 200 kilobytes of JavaScript plus some small images. The trees are PNGs made from my own PHOTOS - not generated as graphics. The trees are pseudorandomly distributed on the wooded parts of the terrain but in such a way that if you move back to the same spot you will of course see exactly the same scene. Explore this terrain at https://www.myforest.uk and look at the user guide which has links to a page about how it is programmed.
My principle aim is to encourage others to explore the wonderful creative medium of plain HTML5/JavaScript before getting into any deeper waters.
(I admit that my forest may be slow on some devices but of course they are getting faster all the time.)
In answer to the original question: I am not using fractals but you can explore my HTML5/JavaScript implementation of Mandelbrot and Julia sets here: https://www.grelf.net/mandelbrot
7 minutes ago, grelf said:IMHO people are assuming too much clever technicality is always required and are thereby lumbering themselves with huge processing, memory and performance requirements.
I think somewhat the opposite. The "clever" technology is an attempt to cut down on the huge processing and memory requirements while achieving a desired level of performance and capability. Brute force methods are rarely the best.
I only have very superficial knowledge of this, dabbled around a bit with noise and fractals.
I think that the technique, whether fractal/noise or physically "plausible" or real world data, depends on scale and degree of realism one wants.
From how i understood things, fractals or noise generated patterns get overwhelmingly complex computation wise as well, when it comes to planetary dimensions and reasonable resolutions (1m). Mostly because recursion depths or iterations become too deep to do them in real time. Generating a map of let's say 16k * 16k (the max my video card supports) may still be within the limits, but that is far too coarse for my understanding to be of use as a planetary map. But i would use fractals or noise to fill in data on surfaces that would otherwise look a little bleak and dreary.
For a limited landscape though, a terrain for a setting like in a role playing or adventure game or a simulation that may be enough to explore. Further subdivision while rendering could make it further vivid.
For the big scale, especially terrain i mean, i would rather try out some of the newer techniques that try to replicate real world physical processes. At least i would like to tackle that, once i have my terrain renderer running ...
