The Island

Thursday, 13 April 2006.

A while back, I made this little island program. It’s a revision of an earlier program I wrote in JavaScript for a competition, which is itself based on an algorithm I found.

You can left-click and drag to rotate the island, and right-click to generate a new island.

I've been thinking a bit lately on how to generate a dynamic, explorable world. I wonder what the best way to do it is, and from that, what the best way to store such a huge amount of information! I did a little island first, because it’s small and simple, and doesn’t have a wide climatic variety.

I composite 4 textures into two, two each for land (forest, sand) and sea (coast, ocean), depending on the height of the terrain at each point.

Anyway, wouldn’t it be interesting to have little people on the island, walking around? Little towns? Little ships sailing from little ports? Maybe another time, but that’s one of the nicest things about art: you can keep adding on to it forever, and you only know when you're done when you've gone too far. But there’s always further you can go, more that you can do. Itself, it is an endless landscape to be tackled. (Perhaps that’s why I want to produce an endless virtual landscape? Curiouser and curiouser.)

Lavender, the Lonely Pink Elephant