EDIT: I ended up using the FastNoise library found here: https://github.com/Auburns/FastNoise It has everything under the sun which someone might need to generate many different kinds of noise. As the title might suggest its also quite fast!
I'm creating a 2D infinitely, procedural generated world. I load and unload chunks from disc as the player moves. I'm using a cellular automata function to define how local tiles within each chunk are designed but I need noise (Perlin in this case) to define what biome type each chunk will be as new ones are created. I understand how I would translate decimals between 0 and 1 to represent this, my only issue is that the tutorial I followed on creating Perlin noise requires that you pass it a predefined 2d array and returns a noise array of the same size. Because my world grows dynamically I'm a bit confused on how I would use a fixed sized array to designate new chunk types.
Other answers I've seen don't cover exactly how to handle the infinite part of noise generation. My best guess is that I need to somehow generate or expand the noise with each newly created chunk although how I do this stumps me.
Here is some code I translated to C# from here: http://devmag.org.za/2009/04/25/perlin-noise/
admittedly some of the math here I don't fully understand yet, especially the bitwise function!
public class PerlinNoiseGenerator
{
public int OctaveCount { get; set; }
public float Persistence { get; set; }
public PerlinNoiseGenerator(int octaveCount, float persistence)
{
this.OctaveCount = octaveCount;
this.Persistence = persistence;
}
public float[,] GenerateWhiteNoise(int width, int height)
{
float[,] noiseFieldToReturn = new float[width, height];
for (int i = 0; i < width; i++)
{
for (int j = 0; j < height; j++)
{
noiseFieldToReturn[i, j] = (float)Game1.Utility.RGenerator.NextDouble() % 1;
}
}
return noiseFieldToReturn;
}
public float[,] SmoothNoiseField(float[,] whiteNoise, int octave)
{
int width = whiteNoise.GetLength(0);
int height = whiteNoise.GetLength(1);
float[,] smoothField = new float[width, height];
int samplePeriod = 1 << octave;
float sampleFrequency = 1.0f / samplePeriod;
for(int i =0; i < width; i++)
{
int samplei0 = (i / samplePeriod) * samplePeriod;
int samplei1 = (samplei0 + samplePeriod) % width;
float horizontalBlend = (i - samplei0) * sampleFrequency;
for(int j =0; j < height; j++)
{
int samplej0 = (j/samplePeriod) * samplePeriod;
int samplej1 = (samplej0 + samplePeriod) % height;
float verticalBlend = (j - samplej0) * sampleFrequency;
float top = LinearInterpolate(whiteNoise[samplei0, samplej0],
whiteNoise[samplei1, samplej0], horizontalBlend);
float bottom = LinearInterpolate(whiteNoise[samplei0, samplej1],
whiteNoise[samplei1, samplej1], horizontalBlend);
smoothField[i, j] = LinearInterpolate(top, bottom, verticalBlend);
}
}
return smoothField;
}
public float[,] GeneratePerlinNoise(float[,] baseNoise, int octaveCount)
{
int width = baseNoise.GetLength(0);
int height = baseNoise.GetLength(1);
float[][,] smoothNoise = new float[octaveCount][,];
float persistance = .5f;
for(int i =0; i < octaveCount;i++)
{
smoothNoise[i] = SmoothNoiseField(baseNoise, i);
}
float[,] perlinNoise = new float[width, height];
float amplitude = 1f;
float totalAmplitude = 0.0f;
for(int octave = octaveCount - 1; octave > 0; octave-- )
{
amplitude *= persistance;
totalAmplitude += amplitude;
for(int i =0; i < width;i++)
{
for(int j =0; j < height; j++)
{
perlinNoise[i, j] += smoothNoise[octave][i, j] * amplitude;
}
}
}
for(int i =0; i < width; i++)
{
for(int j =0; j < height; j++)
{
perlinNoise[i, j] /= totalAmplitude;
}
}
return perlinNoise;
}
public float LinearInterpolate(float a, float b, float alpha)
{
return a * (1 - alpha) + alpha * b;
}
}
This code should compile and produces a FIXED size array of noise