Procedural Terrain Generation and Path Searching in Education

Abstract

Abstract This paper is primarily devoted to development of an educational desktop application, that describes terrain generating and pathfinding to students. The application is meant for lessons of Artificial Intelligence, that is one of compulsory optional subjects on Department of Informatics and Computers, University of Ostrava. Selected implemented algorithms enable to generate a terrain with adjustable parameters in three different implementations and it also enables pathfinding in three different ways. Used methods are compared according to different criteria for better understanding. Algorithms used in the application for terrain generating are fault method, hill algorithm and value noise. For pathfinding, there were used Dijkstra algorithm, A* and breadth-first search. The application enables camera movement around the terrain and graphical projection of costs of edges for pathfinding.