Scratch

SOScratch wrote:

You would have to script a way to make blocks appear in random orders and not overlap, but also factor in how deep the block has to be.

I cannot show you because that would take hours and I cannot include all that in a forums post and if I did it in a Scratch project, I would probably be in the top-viewed right now.

But there is not much you can do with Scratch on that, unless you somehow hack/find a way to compress everything to do that or do it on another game creator.

You mean because the script would be too big? Even for just a text based game with no graphics or anything?

I've seen it done in javascript. I don't know javascript, but maybe I can take a look at the code and try and make sense of it. It's worth a try, and maybe something will come to me.

I'm not sure what you're trying to describe here. Firstly, is the world scrolling?
There's a couple of simple minecraft terrain generators on scratch already. What you are suggesting is a step further from that. I think lists is definitely the way to go.

You'll probably want to look into interpolation.  Interpolation is taking a set of points and finding what the points between them are.

An example of very simple interpolation is this:


An example of more natural and terrain-looking interpolation could be this:


Essentially, you'll pick a few random points (or let the computer pick them), and let the computer connect them with calculated points.  There are a number of ways to interpolate.  The one I am most familiar with that yields fairly good is something like this:

the height (H) of a point is equal to the height of the points around it, each weighted by the inverse of its distance to the point, squared.  In other words, if you have two points (point A and point B), the point somewhere in the middle is equal to:
(((height of A)/(distance to point A)^2)+((height of B)/(distance to point B)))/((1/(distance to point A)^2)+(1/(distance to point B)^2))

In other words, divide the height of A by its distance, squared, to the point you want to find, and do the same for all other points and their respective distances.  Then divide the resulting number by the sum of the distances squared.  Broken into two parts:

(((height of A)/(distance to point A)^2)+((height of B)/(distance to point B))) = x
height you want = x / ((1/(distance to point A)^2)+(1/(distance to point B)^2))

An actual application of this technique (so you can see the result) is actually part of a project I just posted here.