2D tile map generation

Question

I\'m developing a 2D tile engine and at this moment I\'m working on map generation algorithms.

I tried the basic ones usually involved in simple heightmap generation lik

Answer 1

[hill generation, perlin, diamond square] ... this kind of algorithms seems suitable when dealing with tile maps that also have a height component but this is not my case.

But it is your case. Mountains are higher than plains, and plains are higher than water.

                        ___/
                    ___/ ___ Mountain cutoff
                ___/
         ______/
    ____/ ___ Water cutoff
__/

You can quantize your data so that if it is between one set of levels, it is counted as one type of tile, whereas when it is in a different range, it is a different type of tile. You'll be throwing out some detail, but you'll still get outlines that match the type of noise that you're generating.

It'll probably take a good amount of tweaking, and will require you to generate other land features (besides impassible mountains) yourself, but you'll have to tweak a lot with any content generation solution.