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Hide nothing from him for game development.
He can't have total focus on any particular aspect and be able to ship anything.
Buy this kid a new gaming-class computer every 2 years.
This investment could save you $100,000 in college tuition fees.

This may be advanced, but worth a shot: Game Theory

As far as gameplay goes, follow the mantra of Dwarf Fortress and FTL, "Losing is Fun!".
Occasionally place players in impossible situations so they can experience failure while trying their best.
A game that's too easy or too linear gets dropped quickly.

Maybe he'll pick up the art side as well and make a game before he's out of high school.
8 years is long enough for a really good game, even designed/developed solo - Uplink had 3 devs, Banished is a 1-man shop.
I started programming at age 15 - within a year of getting my 1st computer.
I could have done it earlier, but didn't have the $2000+ required in those days.

More resources
Unity 3d
Playmaker - an AI design tool using zero code.
Blender
Blender Guru
character rigging

Quick assets (some free):
CG Textures
Open Game Art
Turbo Squid

Easy scenery:
Terrain - Terragen
Plants - Speedtree

do any of the big animation studios use fractals to generate "random" landscapes? Does anybody use them in any sort of graphics applications?

I'm not really sure what the "big studios" use, but fractals are used quite a bit in 3D graphics apps. As an example of a program that hinges/is based around fractals: Terragen: http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/productmain.shtml Big Studios have a lot better apps then that, but the same process of using fractals for displacement and textures is in those programs as well.

get yourself a copy of Far Cry or Crysis. They both come with world editors so you can see what it's like. Basically, it's a bit like that Terragen program, where you draw a greyscale map and it then generates a 3D world from it.

...only a bit more complicated...

Actually, if his camera has a Bayer filter over the image sensor, they quite probably are 12 bits per pixel - they're interpolated to something more appropriately RGB afterwards. Until then, they're just red OR green OR blue. Not a combination!

If you're loading raw files into the GIMP, they go through the not-half-bad UFRaw loader. I'm not sure what sort of precision that uses internally, but it's pretty high - on a par with Photoshop's raw loader. Correct the basic contrast and curves in the loader, then it'll be way closer to what's needed when downsampling to 8-bits-per-channel. If you still get banding problems after that, then either your camera suffers from no noise whatsoever, or your photo's stuffed and you need to take a new one. Learn how to use a camera?

(I have had pretty nasty banding effects in some images I was editing due to the GIMP's eight-bit limitations - but these where some pretty borderline cases involving very smooth gradients in skies generated in Terragen. Personally, I'm looking forwards to being able to create some proper, HDR skyboxes with Photoshop - but 32-bits-per-channel colour is a bit ridiculous otherwise... ;-) )

Procedural generation

Spore

Terrain synthesis/generator - Terragen

Renderman shaders

Procedural animation

Practical procedural modeling of plants

Procedural planets

NASA's got the full version of Terragen 2!

If that's your thing, you should check out Terragen, which is free for personal use. There are even people who have already imported the geological data for Mars, for National Geographic no less. It's pretty-pretty.

I even considered taking your product for a spin, but if you can't be arsed to hire a web designer to sell image manipulation software, I can't be arsed to take you seriously.

I hereby deduct one point from your diatribe's validity score for presuming that programmers are artists. Then hire an artist. If OSS applications can get volunteers to make great icons, and sometimes even a useable UI, your commercial software company has no excuse. In addition to the webpage, those Windows 3.1-esque giant icon buttons in the UI have got to go. Oh, and the shitty fractal terrain example images, too (it's 2007, and terragen 2 is coming. Hell, Terragen 1 from years ago looks loads better, and it's free/cheap.) You claim big clients, show big results.

I deduct another point for not addressing product issues. Production artists have to ramp up on lots of applications quickly. Showing off a cluttered mess of a UI on an unreadable webpage with horrible dayglo fractal sample images in the screenshots does not give me confidence in the production-worthiness or ease of use of your tool. If you want to reach people, consider explaining why your morpher is a better option than Combustion, Fusion, Shake, or even an ancient copy of Elastic Reality from the top shelf in the closet, for example. Another example is that when examining your 70+ layer modes, fully half of the first ten should really be composed of multiple operators, both to increase flexibility and to reduce clutter (why should I have to memorize, and pick from, a list of 70, if half of them are "inverted foo"? Why layers instead of nodes, for that matter, if you're touting a powerful procedural compositor with a robust scripting language?)
Perhaps the most glaring red flag is the lack of a user-to-user forum. That suggests either that nobody is using the software, or that you don't want people talking to each other about it.

I deduct another point for characterizing your criticism as "constructive" when it was simply an opportunity to bluster about web pages. I just suggested some positive steps you can take. So did the GP, for that matter. Harsh criticism is a day-to-day reality of the industry you're serving, and people who take it personally wdon't tend to last long. Don't get mad, you're getting valuable feedback from your target market.

Finally, I deduct another point for being offtopic. Since I'm replying to your reply, it's on-topic now.

HAND.

Make a case that your software will make artists lives easier and more productive, with great sample images and clear feature examples, and you just might have a hit.

I even considered taking your product for a spin, but if you can't be arsed to hire a web designer to sell image manipulation software, I can't be arsed to take you seriously.

I hereby deduct one point from your diatribe's validity score for presuming that programmers are artists. Then hire an artist. If OSS applications can get volunteers to make great icons, and sometimes even a useable UI, your commercial software company has no excuse. In addition to the webpage, those Windows 3.1-esque giant icon buttons in the UI have got to go. Oh, and the shitty fractal terrain example images, too (it's 2007, and terragen 2 is coming. Hell, Terragen 1 from years ago looks loads better, and it's free/cheap.) You claim big clients, show big results.

I deduct another point for not addressing product issues. Production artists have to ramp up on lots of applications quickly. Showing off a cluttered mess of a UI on an unreadable webpage with horrible dayglo fractal sample images in the screenshots does not give me confidence in the production-worthiness or ease of use of your tool. If you want to reach people, consider explaining why your morpher is a better option than Combustion, Fusion, Shake, or even an ancient copy of Elastic Reality from the top shelf in the closet, for example. Another example is that when examining your 70+ layer modes, fully half of the first ten should really be composed of multiple operators, both to increase flexibility and to reduce clutter (why should I have to memorize, and pick from, a list of 70, if half of them are "inverted foo"? Why layers instead of nodes, for that matter, if you're touting a powerful procedural compositor with a robust scripting language?)
Perhaps the most glaring red flag is the lack of a user-to-user forum. That suggests either that nobody is using the software, or that you don't want people talking to each other about it.

I deduct another point for characterizing your criticism as "constructive" when it was simply an opportunity to bluster about web pages. I just suggested some positive steps you can take. So did the GP, for that matter. Harsh criticism is a day-to-day reality of the industry you're serving, and people who take it personally wdon't tend to last long. Don't get mad, you're getting valuable feedback from your target market.

Finally, I deduct another point for being offtopic. Since I'm replying to your reply, it's on-topic now.

HAND.

Make a case that your software will make artists lives easier and more productive, with great sample images and clear feature examples, and you just might have a hit.

I certainly didn't do it, but how about the absolute daddy of procedural texturing?

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tgd/gallery/g allerymain.php

From a quick view of their gallery, they all look rather computer generated. I still favour Terragen.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tgd/tgd_mars_ movie.html

Get a hold of Blender for 3D animation and rendering. You can use Terragen to create photorealistic landscapes. You can grab a kick-ass free model of the martian tripod, or if you've got $65 to spare, you could buy a pre-made model of a martian tripod. I don't recall what type of ship the Thunderchild was supposed to be, so I can't provide a link to that, but there are lots of free models you can find for that, too. That should just about do it... all you need for a CGI recreation of the scene, on a budget of $0.

If you don't like CGI, you could just make a paper model of the martian tripod and shoot it on video in your kitchen sink. The quality might suffer a bit, though.

There's a really cool collection of various WotW artwork here that should help inspire you.

Considering this is what I do for a living.

I won't be able to give you much advice for doing this on Linux, or with Open Source software, since I'm actually not aware of anything that meets both those criteria. I know you didn't stipulate those criteria, but this is Slashdot.

The first issue you face is converting bitmapped contour data into a heightfield. This is not the same as converting greyscale to heightfields, which is a trivial matter. Most of the links proposed already cover using a greyscale image.

A helpful site for you will be http://terrainmap.com/. He has an application (Windows, $free) called Blackart that tries to extract meaning from scanned topo map contours and build a DEM/heightfield out of it. A commercial app (Windows, $1500) that does the same thing is R2V. I've not used either so I can't comment on what you get for your $1500.

Once you have a DEM, you can probably find a way to convert it into a file format that Blender can use as a 3D object and apply texturing to.

The next step is, what kind of texturing? If you just want to be able to slap some pretty-looking colors or natural-looking dirt/rock/grass/snow effects onto it, you can probably do that in Blender. If Blender can't do everything you want, you might try Terragen (Windows/Mac, $free), which is a little more landscape-oriented. I would not recommend VistaPro at this point, it's pretty outdated. TG is at least still being developed, although it's going commercial.

If you need to be able to place real-world image information onto the terrain (airphoto or satellite images, GIS databases, other scanned maps, etc) then Blender is really becoming a poor choice for your needs. (What were your criteria for choosing Blender anyway? It's not known for its landscape capabilities.) The trouble becomes that data like these are usually stored in a different Coordinate System (read the whole VTP site while you're there, Ben's got GREAT info). This means that lining up the position, size and rotation of the two pieces of data is difficult if your software doesn't know how to do it for you. Even most low-end landscape software (Terragen, VistaPro, more free here) can't do this. This is the realm of typically fairly expensive commercial 3D landscape software with a GIS tie-in, such as ESRI's 3D Analyst (Windows, $3500) read info on commercial page above) and my company's Visual Nature Studio (Windows/Mac, $2500).

I won't pretend that my company's product meets your needs, but I have to mention it. I suspect that you'll be able to meet your requirements using some of the tools I outlined first. If however, you find yourself doing this sort of stuff a lot, that's where the polish, integration, support and other frills of commercial software like mine may start to become valuable to you.

Hope you find what you're looking for. If you (or anybody else) have more questions about this, I'd be happy to answer them privately or publicly. As you can see from the above, despite selling my software, I try to be objective and don't always tell you my product is what you need. ;)

It's a Windows app, but Terragen may do what you need. There are several plugins to it that allow you to use various things, such as bitmaps, to generate the terrain. The plugins also output in a variety of formats.

Wow, another GISer on Slashdot (not too many).

Terragen makes attractive 3D layouts. It is both free and easy to use.

It is essentially useless for geospatial analysis (I haven't messed around with it in a couple of years, so who knows), but it is remarkably easy to make some cool terrain, add vegetation, and brew up some clouds on the horizon.

I would hope he isn't interested in making realistic landscapes, Mojoworld seems only good for making planets that are completely abstract. Terragen is a better choice for photorealistic landscapes, and a Mac version is coming along in development.

Yes. Karma-whoring, here I come :-)

The best land generator I've found is Torben Mongensen's "planet.c". You can find it here. It's not GPL, but you can see the source and learn of it, at least :-) The results are quite good, though there's a few limitations: it doesn't do erosion and rivers, for example, which is something that could be very, very important if you want to use a map for a RPG setting. Rivers are the places where many cities are built, and crossing of rivers are always fertile lands. Well, anyway it's the only gripe I have about this program. For the rest, I like it very much :-) It can do a lot of different projections, and magnification, so you can really see the world from every point of view.

There's other nice terrain generator here. This does erosion and rivers, and the source is also available. It's for Windows, though the creator says that should compile well in Linux or related. I haven't tried yet O:-) The problem is that, besides not being "readily available" for Linux, I don't like the maps generated by it too much. And it doesn't plenty of projections, as Mogensen's program does (or, to be precise, I think it doesn't; I'm not a expert with this program). It runs fine under Wine, btw ;-)

Another fine tool: TerraGen. Shareware, but free for personal use. Great. The results of this program are awesome. I'm sure that it's easy to use the output of Mogensen's program to renderize it (some small part, I mean) with TerraGen, but I haven't tried a lot and consequently I don't know how :-/ This runs somewhat well under Wine, too.

The program that looks great for all this, anyway, is MojoWorld. And not forgetting, of course, all of ProFantasy Products. But these cost quite a few bucks, so I don't have and can't speak about them O:-)

Fractal terrain generation is something I'm quite interested, though only from the user point of view. I don't know how to even program something to output a simple Mandelbrot fractal O:-) If you know something more about all this, don't make me check for every /. post: mail me at ask4it (at) gpul.org :-)

I have to agree with you AC, that Terragen is very impressive.

Want to know what is more impressive about it?

It is written mostly in Visual Basic (don't believe me? Email the author. I found out after having a conversation with him about using VB for 3D stuff like this a few years ago, because I noticed it installing the VB runtime during setup).

The guy who has written Terragen DOES know his stuff!

Funny thing is, the damn thing is written in VB - put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Here's a link for the curious:

Planetside - the Home of Terragen

Here are some images as well:

Terragen Images

The guy who has written Terragen DOES know his stuff!

Funny thing is, the damn thing is written in VB - put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Here's a link for the curious:

Planetside - the Home of Terragen

Here are some images as well:

Terragen Images