Simen Wolters
Generalist Game Programmer
simenwol@gmail.com🎓 3rd year game programming student at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Custom Procedural Terrain Generator
January 24, 2025
Custom Procedural Terrain Generator was a solo research project, implemented in a custom ECS-based C++ game engine.
My Contributions: Height-Based Terrain Generation using Perlin Noise | Texture Support | Terrain-specific Renderpass | Biomes & Biome Blending | Chunking | LOD through Tesselation Shaders | Blogpost
Engine/Tools: FastNoiseLite | GLM | OpenGL | GLSL (Vertex, Fragment & Tesselation Shaders) | ImGui | EnTT
Team Size: Solo
Duration: 8 weeks (Nov 2024 - Jan 2025)
🌍 Custom Procedural Terrain Generator - Runtime Infinite Terrain in a Custom C++ ECS Engine
Custom Procedural Terrain Generator was a solo technical research project focused on building a fully procedural, infinitely scalable terrain system inside a custom ECS-based C++ engine. The goal was to explore the balance between mathematical generation techniques, real-time performance constraints, and artistic control in large-scale environments.
The system generates heightmap-based terrain using multilayered noise, dynamic chunk streaming, biome blending, and shader-driven LOD through tessellation. Beyond technical implementation, the project focused heavily on system architecture, runtime efficiency, and exposing parameters for creative experimentation.
This project served as both an engine programming exercise and a deeper exploration into procedural world generation pipelines used in modern games.
A technical blogpost documenting some research decisions, implementation challenges, and lessons learned can be found here: Read the development blogpost.