I recently moved all my graphics and games development over to Python, using Pyglet. Overall this has been a very good change, with a great increase in productivity, but unfortunately it has caused a few problems.

Previously, I had been using libnoise for all procedural generation, but it turns out that Pyglet is implemented using ctypes, while the only available python bindings for libnoise were generated using SWIG.

Naturally, the developer's of ctypes and SWIG never made basic pointers compatible (nor with boost::python), so it turns out that there is no way to load a libnoise generated image into a Pyglet/OpenGL texture.

I haven't been entirely happy with libnoise for sometime (primarily because of difficulties tiling voronoi noise), so this gives me the perfect excuse to dive in and implement my own noise library.

The library is developed in C++ (for efficiency), and has an external interface written in C, to easily interface with Python (using ctypes). At this stage the entire library is contained in a single source file, and weighs in at just under 500 lines of code.

The code itself is flexible and extensible: You create one or more Generators (which can each combine other Generators), and a Renderer, and feed both to a Generate function.

The image above was generated by a python script, and shows off all the current features of the library. Two generators are provided (simplex noise and voronoi), which can be combined into octaves (fractal-brownian motion), and blended together (weighted addition). The image can then be rendered in greyscale (such as for a heightmap), or rendered with a colour palette (as in the lower left image), and in either unsigned byte or float precision.

I hope to add several generators, in particular more blending functions, in the coming weeks. After that, with a little code cleanup, I think an open-source google code release is likely.