"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

—Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Terasology

Terasology

Terasology is a game that pays ample tribute to Minecraft in initial look and origin, but stakes out its own niche by adopting the NPC-helper and caretaker feel from such games as Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper, while striving for added depth and sophistication.

Terasology is an open source project started by Benjamin “begla” Glatzel to research procedural terrain generation and efficient rendering techniques in Java using the LWJGL. The engine uses a block-based voxel-like approach as seen in Minecraft. After proving itself as a solid tech demo begla was joined at first by Anton “small-jeeper” Kireev and Rasmus “Cervator” Praestholm and a full-fledged game concept was born.

The creators of Terasology are a diverse mix of software developers, game testers, graphic artists, and musicians. Get involved by checking out our Community Portal, our blog Moving Blocks!, and our Facebook Page.

Terasology is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and available in source code form at GitHub.

FractalTerrain

FractalTerrain

FractalTerrain is a library I implemented as an extension for a graphics framework developed at my university. It provides many different noise generator and modifier modules that can be easily composed to form a vast amount of advanced terrain generation modules.

The library supports the generation of 2D images (rendered using virtual lighting techniques) and 3D meshes using simple heightmaps or volumes as input. The volumetric meshes are generated using the Marching Cubes algorithm. FractalTerrain is written in C# and uses the XNA framework for 3D rendering. The skypsheres were rendered using Vue 9 and a spectral atmosphere model.

weTravel

weTravel

I wrote my bachelor thesis on the broad subject of iPhone development with focus on implementing feature rich, but efficient mobile applications. Furthermore the subject of Web 2.0 application development using the example of Ruby on Rails is discussed.

The thesis also covers the the development of a full-featured iPhone application in conjunction with a corresponding Web 2.0 application and a lightweight web service for integration purposes.

The homepage of the iPhone application weTravel forming the foundation of this thesis and the corresponding web portal can be found here.