Having a quality map to play a role-playing game on is very important. Quality is relative, but usually we expect some oceans/lakes, some mountains, and terrain in between. It’s hard to get it balanced right, let alone randomly generate those features. In my experience, noise functions like Perlin noise don’t do a good enough job alone to generate terrain – you need to put more into into it.
In the picture above, you can see my take at generating a 2D map (which then needs to be turned into a 3D map later). I iterated by randomly generating “biomes” such as water (blue), grass (green), and mountains (white). You can see the results look pretty good, with good distributions of each. There are both large and small bodies of water, and a good distribution of land types.
I’m happy with it so far – there’s a lot more I’d like to do but I’m in prototyping mode.