Terrain gen (Acerola's Dirt Jam)

This Godot project is my submission Acerola's Dirt Jam, which took part during the whole of July 2025. It's only a proof of concept, not a full-working game, plus this is my first time working this deep with Godot, so don't expect a lot of polish.

Features

This project features an in-editor terrain generator script, which dispatches to the GPU as a compute shader. I implemented hyraulic and thermal erosion simulations based on a couple of papers I found. After the generation, the textures are saved and assigned to the corresponding materials and scripts. In the editor there are preview meshes to help visualize, but in game the terrain and water meshes are rendered using clipmaps which are basically LODs for terrains.

The terrain itself is generated in multiple passes in the compute shader. First, the base heightmap is generated via an FBM of Perlin noises (just like the original implementation). Then the erosion iterations take place, before finalizing all the textures in the final 2 stages of the compute shader. I don't know whether this was the best approach for a multi-pass execution but hey, it works.

The original submission had inefficiencies in terms of resource management, in which I didn't realize Image and ImageTexture were non-interchangeable. This resulted in materials with 500+MB sizes which was nonsensical to put in a Git repository. I solved this issue a few days after and the final build probably has a smaller size, but the end result is exactly the same as during submission.

This was far from my original vision, but still I'm proud of it. There are a lot of
things I wished that I had the knowledge and skill to implement, and on top of that I encountered several critical bugs (one of which is the odd black splotches on the terrain).

Source code

https://github.com/zhfr7/terrain-gen

Screenshots

Credits

Huge thanks to Acerola for hosting the game jam! I wouldn't have learned this much about game development and graphics programming if it weren't for this game jam.

Credits to Poly Haven for textures used in this project.