#godot

Stepping inside the generated world on a Meta Quest 2: head-relative walking, teleporting, a comfort vignette, and a fly mode for seeing it from above.

Generating gentle ambient music at runtime from a pentatonic scale — and why that choice of scale means it can't really play a wrong note.

Warm lamp posts along the roads, fireflies over the meadows, and windows that glow — the lights that make a dark world feel cosy instead of empty.

A procedural sky that runs from day through sunset to a dark, starry night, plus the fog and post-processing that give every world a consistent, art-directed look.

Making grass and plants sway by bending each blade in the vertex shader, based on its height and position plus a global wind the weather controls.

Drawing tens of thousands of grass blades is fine if you do it in one batch and only near the player — the two ideas that keep the grass cheap enough for VR.

Generating endless cottages from a handful of parameters: walls, one of four parametric roof types, a door, and windows that light up at night.

The boids algorithm: three simple rules each fish follows on its own add up to a school that moves, turns and scatters as a group.

Slow, erratic, ground-hugging flight and the occasional rest — the small ambient detail that makes a meadow feel inhabited.

A flying bird, with no model: a body, two flapping wings and a tail made from simple shapes, plus a bit of steering and banking to make the motion read.

A flat surface reads as water once you add a few things: moving waves, a colour that deepens with depth, foam at the shoreline, and brighter reflections at grazing angles.

Connecting the houses with a road network that winds around hills instead of going straight over them, using a minimum spanning tree and A* pathfinding.

Rivers are placed by simulating water running downhill: filling in pits so everything drains to the sea, then tracing flow from the high ground down.

Scattering a few seed points and assigning every spot to its nearest one — a Voronoi diagram — divides the map into biomes, with soft edges so they don't seam.

How a grid of smooth random numbers — Perlin noise — becomes terrain, and the handful of parameters that turn it into hills, plains or mountains.

An overview of a procedurally generated VR world built in Godot, and an index of the posts that explain how each part works.