World-Generator

Why I built it

I built World-Generator as a hands-on procedural-generation learning project. The current prototype explores terrain generation in C++20, renders the result with SDL3, and provides an interactive camera for navigating the generated map.

Implemented behavior

The application currently creates a 2048 × 1024 grid of cells and generates terrain from a fixed random seed. Its terrain pass places 15 mountains at pseudorandom positions. Each mountain combines two Gaussian elevation contributions: one for the peak and one for the surrounding highlands. Overlapping contributions accumulate in each cell.

The SDL3 renderer converts elevation into four visual bands:

• water at elevation 0 or below;
• lowlands below 200;
• highlands below 600;
• mountains at 600 and above.

The map opens in a resizable 1024 × 768 window. Current controls are:

• drag with the left mouse button to pan;
• use the mouse wheel to zoom toward the cursor;
• press R to reset the camera;
• press Escape or close the window to exit.

Zoom is clamped between 0.1× and 10×. The cell model also contains temperature, rainfall, and water fields, although the current terrain generator and renderer operate on elevation.

Technology and architecture

The project is a native C++20 application built with CMake 3.20 or newer and SDL3. The code separates responsibilities into:

• Cell, which stores per-cell world values;
• Map, which owns and initializes the two-dimensional cell grid;
• TerrainGenerator, which performs seeded elevation generation;
• Camera2D, which manages panning, zoom limits, cursor-centered zoom, and reset behavior;
• SDLRenderer, which owns the SDL window, event loop, and elevation-based rendering.

The executable links against the SDL3 CMake package. There is no backend, network service, persistence layer, release package, or browser build in the current repository.

Build and run

Prerequisites supported by the repository are a C++20 compiler, CMake 3.20 or newer, and an SDL3 installation discoverable by CMake.

The included script configures, builds, and launches the application:

./run.sh

The equivalent commands are:

cmake -S . -B cmake-build-debug
cmake --build cmake-build-debug -j
./cmake-build-debug/WorldGenerator

Current limitations

The renderer currently visits every cell on every frame. Viewport-culling logic is present only as commented code, so it does not reduce work outside the visible area. The repository's latest development note records severe generation and interaction lag on maps larger than roughly 1024 × 1024; the current hard-coded map is larger than that threshold.

Terrain is limited to the current mountain/elevation pass, uses a fixed seed in main.cpp, and is not configurable through a UI or command-line options. The repository has no automated tests and its README is currently empty, so source code and build configuration remain the authoritative usage documentation.

Future direction

Planned work is focused on two areas:

1. optimize large-map generation and rendering, including avoiding unnecessary per-frame work;
2. improve the visual quality of generated terrain and mountains.

These are future goals, not currently implemented features.