After reading the blog post at n0tch.tumblr.com/post/4231184692/terrain-generation-part-1. I was interested in Notch's solution by sampling at lower resolutions. I implemented this solution in my engine, but instantly noticed he didn't go into detail what he interpolated between to smooth out the noise.
From the blog:
Unfortunately, I immediately ran into both performance issues and playability issues. Performance issues because of the huge amount of sampling needed to be done, and playability issues because there were no flat areas or smooth hills. The solution to both problems turned out to be just sampling at a lower resolution (scaled 8x along the horizontals, 4x along the vertical) and doing a linear interpolation.
This is the result of the low-res method without smoothing: low-res voxel
I attempted to smooth out the noise in the chunk noise array and instantly noticed a problem: attempt at smoothing
The noise also looks less random now.
As you can see, there is an obvious transition between chunks. How exactly do I use interpolation to smooth out the low resolution noise map so that the border between chunks smoothly connect while still appearing random?
