i think i want an early area in flax to be foresty so i'm workin on that
i've been trying to make forest paths work for a couple days and finally got something i like! went through a lot of false starts but this is working pretty well
paths should look vaguely natural
if a human would expect two areas to be connected by a path, they should be
if there are areas blocked off by trees, a path should cut through the trees
(note that atm only areas with short grass — the green dots — are considered, so in this screenshot there's an orphan area at the bottom)
i tried some A* and looked into some other graph-traversal algorithms for a while but eventually settled on something a bit different
the forest itself is generated with perlin noise, which is an algorithm for producing an n-dimensional "plasma" pattern, varying from low to high with distinct peaks and valleys. all i do is make a grid of noise, then treat low values as short grass, high values as trees, and medium values as long grass.
so what i did was flood the forest. not like a floodfill; like actually pouring water into the terrain, treating the noise values as a height.
start with all the local minima — the tiles that are lower than all of their neighbors. fill each of these with "water", making some number of distinct puddles.
find the lowest dry neighbor of a wet tile. raise the water level to cover this tile. remember which wet tile it was a neighbor of.
if raising the water level joins two puddles, congratulations! you found a path. draw a dirt tile where they touched. you have two trails to two starting tiles, by following neighors backwards; draw dirt tiles along those trails too.
repeat until all the puddles are joined into one big puddle. you're done!
it makes a lot of natural sense. if you consider the noise values to be a measurement of how rarely-traveled a tile is, then it makes perfect sense to have trees for high values, grass for low values, and forest trails along the lowest-valued paths.
because the noise values aren't visible on the map itself, it just looks like a bunch of moderately chaotic lines. it's hard to guess at a glance how this map was generated. which is great.
it'll only break through trees as a last resort; i don't have to do anything special to enforce that.
it will prefer the "long way around" to cutting through a single tree. but there are usually other clearings near the long path, so it usually works fine.
i don't think it will ever draw triangles, since it won't try to draw a path between parts of a puddle that have already joined together.
atm it sometimes infinite-loops, oops
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