modest canopy
So for a long time I've wanted a terrain generation system where instead of manually painting mountains, hills, etc you could generate "biomes" on top.
Obviously this is an old concept, BUT most systems procedurally generate where what biome goes, etc
What im thinking about is a system where you as the user have just a sort of basic plane, onto which you could draw "zones" that affect the terrain based on inputs.
For example you could make a custom mountain zone with multiple different perlin noises layered on top of each other, multiplied by different magnitudes, scales, offsets etc and then once youve made it, you just paint where you want those mountains to go and it handles the actual "deforming" of the mesh.
I'd like to know what you all think the best method for doing this would be. My initial thought is creating a 2d grid and then adding a "modifier" class which stores these various deformation layers by name, and then offsets the points on the grid, followed by drawing a mesh.
The difficulty comes from how to actually paint onto the mesh to form the mask for the zones. So far my best idea has been to create a texture which uses color to determine where the mask is, however this becomes a lot more complex if the mapnsize is ever adjusted, since the various masks / textures would then no longer be the right size for it.
Ant thoughts from all of you on what would be a good way to handle this?