2D Terrain by Midpoint Displacement in SWIFT

SWIFT 2.x, Xcode 7.x, Mac OS

Source Article

I was looking at different methods for generating 2D terrain and came accross this article by Loktar:

Simple 2d Terrain With Midpoint Displacement http://www.somethinghitme.com/2013/11/11/simple-2d-terrain-with-midpoint-displacement/

I rewrote the JavaScript sample from the article in SWIFT (which was suprisingly easy). While there are other methods for 2D terrain generation, I thought this was a very nice implementation of midpoint displacement.

What Does this Do?

The app generates an array of points representing terrain. We then use the points to make a path, and pass it into a SKShapeNode. Clicking on the screen will generate a new node.

Performance Considerations

I tested the SKShapeNode with a physics body and it performed pretty poorly, a better option to use this in a game where physics are needed, might be to convert the path to a bitmap and use that instead.