Well, I'm at it again.

I've had a couple interlocked projects on the back burner for awhile and just recently I had a breakthrough on one of them. Specifically, Mercator, a content generation system based on Perlin noise.

You can find out more about Perlin noise here. It's named for Ken Perlin whose work won an Academy Award in 1997.

Specifically, I've got the initial step in a complete form as a Flash object here. It will load *very* fast (everything involved can be measured in terms of kilobytes), but may take up to 5-8 seconds of processing on your side of things, depending on how good your computer is.

It's not particularly impressive considering how long it takes to finish the work it's doing, but there's actually a lot of data you're not seeing yet. The program itself has data for height maps, including how high the landmasses shown go, etc, but I have yet to write the code that will interpret all of that into a meaningful map.

If you re-load the page you should get a different map every time. I think they're rather pretty. I'm hoping to keep the same style as I put more and more data into them.