Terrain Generator (using the Diamond Square Algorithm)
The first time I tried implementing this fractal land generator, my mind folded up from the effort of trying to understand the process. I understand fractals fine, but the tutorial on gameprogramming.com did something weird with array sizes that did my head in. Second time around, I stuck to my own array indexing scheme (using an exact power of 2, thank you) and got the algorithm to function correctly in a single day. I spent part of the next day putting on graphical presentation and nicer colours.
Here is one terrain result. The colours are OK, but not too pretty yet.
[Truly beautiful results will require some lengthy re-picking of colours for different heights.]
