Voxel circles using a noise function - function

I'm creating a 2D space game where the map is made up of square tiles. I would like a noise function that I can use to generate circular planet, by circular planets I mean 'circles' made out of squares (basically like a circle in Minecraft). The planet's radius should be of all different sizes. The reason I want to use noise is that I want the user to be able to generate a map with a seed so they can generate the same planets again. (the planets should be randomly distributed, not uniformly spaced) How would I implement this using noise so that it procedurally generates?

Place randomly positioned points (circle center)
Then using the same seed generate variable circle radius
To get 'voxels' cut the circle into a grid using division ...
This should do the trick.

Related

Drawing over terrain with depth test?

i'm trying to render geometrical shapes over uneven terrain (loaded from heightmap / shapes geometry is also generated based on averaged heights across the heightmap however they do not fit it exactly). I have the following problem - somethimes the terrain shows through the shape like showed on the picture.
Open Image
I need to draw both terrain and shapes with depth testing enabled so they do not obstruct other objects in the scene.. Could someone suggest a solution to make sure the shapes are always rendered on top ? Lifting them up is not really feasible... i need to replace the colors of actual pixel on the terrain and doing this in pixel shader seems too expensive..
thanks in advance
I had a similar problem and this is how I solved it:
You first render the terrain and keep the depth buffer. Do not render
any objects
Render solid bounding box of the shape you want to put on the terrain.
You need to make sure that your bounding box covers all
the height range the shape covers
An over-conservative estimation is to use the global minimum and maximum elevation of the entire
terrain
In the pixel shader, you read depth buffer and reconstructs world space position
You check if this position is inside your shape
In your case you can check if its xy (xz) projection is within the given distance from
the center of your given circle
Transform this position into your shape's local coordinate system and compute the desired color
Alpha-blend over the render target
This method results in shapes perfectly aligned with the terrain surface. It also does not produce any artifacts and works with any terrain.
The possible drawback is that it requires using deferred-style shading and I do not know if you can do this. Still, I hope this might be helpful for you.

How to render a circular/radial progress bar in Libgdx?

For a game we develop with libgdx, we need to show the user the remaining time for making a move.
How can we render a circular progress bar which shows the remaining seconds?
In the following answer there is a javascript solution :
Circular / radial progress bar
Thanks.
First create a texture (region) with the full circular progress bar. Next deform a shape (mesh) made up of one or more triangles to fit the actual area which should be shown.
For this, think of a line from the center of the image to the bounds of the image. Calculate the intersection point (and "wall", i.e. left, right, top or bottom of the image) of the line at the given angle. This will give you the portion of the texture (region) that needs to be drawn.
For example, if the line at rest (angle is zero) crosses the bottom wall of the image at the middle, your image is square and you want to rotate clockwise, then everything between 45 and 135 degrees hits the left wall, between 135 and 225 degrees hits the top wall, and so on.
Now you have the shape, you'll need to express it in triangle. Or to maintain compatibility with libgdx's spritebatch, an even number of triangles. Make sure to update the U and V values according to the location of the vertex.
A simple implementation of this can be found over here: https://github.com/xoppa/world/blob/master/src/com/xoppa/android/misc/RadialSprite.java
You could use an OpenGL shader to generate a circular progress bar. Here is an animated timer that would be a good place to start: http://glsl.heroku.com/e#10201.0
However, I don't think there is any good Libgdx infrastructure for dropping in shaders like this. You would have to use the OpenGL APIs (see https://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/OpenGLShader).

Calculate if intersection between polygon and raster image

If I have an binary image and a irregular convex polygon how can I calculate if they intersect each other? The coordinates of the polygon are described in terms of the image.
I have a few ideas on this, coming from either a collision detection or fill algorithm perspective, but I don't think either would be optimal. I'm sure there is a tried and tested method for this but can't think of the keywords.
Here is an example of what I mean:
In this case it should return true.
I would recommend this following algorithm:
Traverse the border of the polygon using Bresenham's algorithm for each line, and at each pixel, sample the raster. If it's a color you accept to be visible, such as a nonzero alpha, report an intersection.
This has the advantage of only working over the edges of the polygon, so you don't need to iterate over all the pixels inside the polygon.

Culling interior triangles

I have an array of thousands of quads; 4-sided 3D polygons. All I know are the coordinates of the quad corners.
A subset of these quads define the closed outer shell of a 3D shape. The remaining quads are on the inside of this closed solid.
How do I figure out which quads are part of the shell and which quads are part of the interior? This is not performance critical code.
Edit: Further constraints on the shape of the shell
There are no holes inside the shape, it is a single surface.
It contains both convex and concave portions.
I have a few points which are known to be on the inside of the shell.
This might be hard to implement if your shape self intersects, but if you can find one quad that you know is on the surface (possibly one furthest away from the centroid) then map out concentric circles of quads around it. Then find a continuous ring of quads outside that and so on, until you end up at the "opposite" side. If your quads intersect, or are internally connected, then that's more difficult. I'd try breaking apart those which intersect, then find all the possible smooth surfaces, and pick the one with the greatest internal volume.
How about this?
Calculate the normal vector of a quad (call this the 'current' quad).
Do an intersection test with that vector and all the remaining quads.
If it intersects another quad in the positive portion of the vector you know the current quad is an internal quad. Repeat for all the remaining quads.
This assumes the quads 'face' outward.
Consider that all of the quads live inside a large sealed box. Pick one quad. Do raytracing; treat that quad as a light source, and treat all other quads as reflective and fuzzy, where a hit to a quad will send light in all directions from that surface, but not around corners.
If no light rays hit the external box after all nodes have had a chance to be hit, treat that quad as internal.
If it's convex, or internal quads didn't share edges with external quads, there are easier ways.
It can be done quite easily if the shape is convex. When the shape is concave it is much harder.
In the convex case find the centroid by computing the average of all of the points. This gives a point that is in the interior for which the following property holds:
If you project four rays from the
centroid to each corner of a quad you
define a pyramid cut into two parts,
one part contains space interior to
the shape and the other part defines
space that might be exterior to the
shape.
These two volumes give you a decision process to check if a quad is on the boundary or not. If any point from another quad occurs in the outside volume then the quad is not on the boundary and can be discarded as an interior quad.
Edit: Just seen your clarification above. In the harder case that the shape is concave then you need one of two things;
A description (parameterisation) of the shape that you can use to choose quads with, or
Some other property such as all of the boundary quads being contiguous
Further edit: Just realised that what you are describing would be a concave hull for the points. Try looking at some of the results in this search page.
You may be able to make your problem easier by reducing the number of quads that you have to deal with.
You know that some of the quads form a closed shell. Therefore, those quads are connected at their edges. If three mutually adjacent edges of a quad (that is, the edges form a closed loop) overlap the edge of another quad, then these quads might be part of the shell (these mutually adjacent edges serve as the boundary of a 2D region; let's call that region the "connected face" of the quad). Make a list of these "shell candidates". Now, look through this list and throw out any candidate who has an edge that does not overlap with another candidate (that is, the edge overlaps an edge of a quad that is not in the list). Repeat this culling process until you are no longer able to remove any quads. What you have left should be your shell. Create a "non-shell quads" list containing all of the quads not in the "shell" list.
Draw a bounding box (or sphere, ellipse, etc) around this shell. Now, look through your list of non-shell quads, and throw out any quads that lie outside of the bounding region. These are definitely not in the interior.
Take the remaining non-shell quads. These may or may not be in the interior of the shape. For each of these quads, draw lines perpendicular to the quad from the center of each face that end on the surface of the bounding shape. Trace each line and count how many times the line crosses through the "connected face" of a quad in your shell list. If this number is odd, then that vertex lies in the interior of the shape. If it is even, the vertex is on the exterior. You can determine whether a quad is inside or outside based on whether its vertices are inside or outside.

How can I turn an image file of a game map into boundaries in my program?

I have an image of a basic game map. Think of it as just horizontal and vertical walls which can't be crossed. How can I go from a png image of the walls to something in code easily?
The hard way is pretty straight forward... it's just if I change the image map I would like an easy way to translate that to code.
Thanks!
edit: The map is not tile-based. It's top down 2D.
I dabble in video games, and I personally would not want the hassle of checking the boundaries of pictures on the map. Wouldn't it be cleaner if these walls were objects that just happened to have an image property (or something like it)? The image would display, but the object would have well defined coordinates and a function could decide whether an object was hit every time the player moved.
I need more details.
Is your game tile based? Is it 3d?
If its tile based, you could downsample your image to the tile resolution and then do a 1:1 conversion with each pixel representing a tile.
I suggest writing a script that takes each individual pixel and determines if it represents part of a wall or not (ie black or white). Then, code your game so that walls are built from individual little block, represented by the pixels. Shouldn't be TOO hard...
If you don't need to precompute anything using the map info. You can just check in runtime logic using getPixel(x,y) like function.
Well, i can see two cases with two different "best solution" depending on where your graphic comes from:
Your graphics is tiled, and thus you can easily "recognize" a block because it's using the same graphics as other blocks and all you would have to do is a program that, when given a list of "blocking tiles" and a map can produce a "collision map" by comparing each tile with tiles in the "blocking list".
Your graphics is just some graphics (e.g. it could be a picture, or some CG graphics) and you don't expect pixels for a block to be the same as pixels from another block. You could still try to apply an "edge detection" algorithm on your picture, but my guess is then that you should rather split your picture in a BG layer and a FG layer so that the FG layer has a pre-defined color (or alpha=0) and test pixels against that color to define whether things are blocking or not.
You don't have much blocking shapes, but they are usually complex (polygons, ellipses) and would be unefficient to render using a bitmap of the world or to pack as "tile attributes". This is typically the case for point-and-click adventure games, for instance. In that case, you're probably to create path that match your boundaries with a vector drawing program and dig for a library that does polygon intersection or bezier collisions.
Good luck and have fun.