The project

In 2018 I made a project for my engineering school that was a landscape generator. The goal of this project was to become more familiar with C++, object-oriented programming and random number generators.

I've chosen to create a space-themed generator with a lot of properties you can tweak in order to change the generated landscape.

The program generates a .svg file that can be opened in a browser to see the result. This extension stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and means that it can be zoomed in and out without any loss of detail, as opposite to an image file.

Run instructions

You will need a c++ compiler and make.

From a terminal, run make from the root of the project, then execute the application with ./landscape-generator.

If you're on Windows you can open the project with an IDE containing an integrated C++ compiler like Command Blocks.

To generate a landscape, run 5) Draw Scene and open in a web browser the generated output.svg image.

The generation parameters

The scene is subdivided in 4 layers :

• The planet's surface contains trees and mountains
• The atmosphere is populated by spaceships and satellites
• The foreground space contains all the different types of planets
• The background space contains all the stars, blackholes and what I call supernovaes (that are juste brighter and bigger stars)

Layers properties

For each layer, you can modify a set of parameters specific to the elements present on the layer.

For each parameter, you can set a minimum and a maximum value that will be used during the random generation.

Surface

• Trees density
• Trees segments count

Flying objects

• Spaceships density
• Satellites density

Planets

• Planets density
• Planets size

Stars

• Stars density and size
• Supernovaes density
• Blackholes density

Random seeds and number generator

For each layer, you also have an option to reset the seed used for the number generator for this specific layer, thus you can regenerate a layer independently from the other ones.

You can also enter a manual seed (represented by a number) or change the whole's scene seed and regenerate the 4 layers to have a completely new landscape

UML Diagram

Structure of the project :

Generated images example

All parameters are set to default.

Note that I took screenshots of the generated SVG output for performance purposes