Midgard, Growing Grass

Now that I have an efficient way to represent a grassy field, I need to allow it to grow. In each iteration, grass will grow from grassy tiles to any barren tiles surrounding the grassy tile.

At the lowest-level grid, this can be specified using bitwise operations.

Bitfield no_left_side = 0x7f7f7f7f7f7f7f7f;
Bitfield no_right_side = 0xfefefefefefefefe;
Bitfield new_field = field |
((field & no_left_side) << 1) |
((field & no_right_side) >> 1) |
(field << 8) |
(field >> 8);


Bitshifting by 1 moves the pattern left/right by one tile, and bitshifting by 8 moves the pattern up/down by one tile. When moving left or right, we need to zero-out bits on one side to prevent moving over the grid’s edge.

In addition, each lowest-level grid needs to be able to be influenced by the grids next to it. Each grid needs to look in the adjacent tiles, to see whether grass should grow into it or not. This needs to be done as a pre-step, before any grass grows, to prevent accidental growth by two tiles in a single iteration.

It is here that I am running into issues. The lowest-level grid can easily look at the adjacent grids. However, suppose there isn’t a lowest-level grid, because it has been entirely filled in. In that case, the lowest-level grids need to be generated, in order to have that level of detail be expressed.

However, it is not sufficient to see grass adjacent to barren ground in a higher-level grid, because either of those tiles might be overridden in a lower-level grid. The next step is to allow recursion, declaring a lowest-level grid to be necessary only if that tile in the current grid has no overrides, and otherwise recursing down to that lower level of detail. The issue with that approach is that finer detail may be needed not because the current grid has overrides, but because an adjacent grid has overrides that need to grow into the current grid.

It is here that I am getting stuck. I feel that there must be a clean algorithm that is amenable to this data structure, but I will need more thought in order to find it.