I’ve been fascinated by procedural generation for over two years now. I have played around with many types of noise generation and even wrote some myself. I’ve been looking into water erosion and procedurally generated biomes and during this time I’ve managed to build some nifty little map generators. Something that has always escaped me, however was generating a procedural map that is not “tile based”. So far, all the procedural map generators I have built relied on one axiom - the map is represented as a 2d matrix containing some sort of information about the terrain that is to be found there. This means that I, by definition, can’t build anything that is not tile based.
And this is why I come here asking for your help. I am curious about how one could render a procedurally generated map in a non tile-based fashion. My end result is the image I posted.
The solution that immediately jumped to my mind is drawing each end every pixel individually, thus making the map look essentially non tile based. This, however would require enormous memory and is unfeasible.
So I am turning to the masters - how can I procedurally generate (and more importantly render) such a map? How would I go about representing the sprites to be drawn? Where do I even get started? This feat is so much out of my grasp that I do not even understand where I should be looking
Note - I know about marching squares and wang tiles. These approaches are however not something I’m fond of because of the huge workload that would go into drawing the resources. I am looking for something more in the realm of algorithms
Thank you!