The Forest (itch) (grelf)

The Forest is both a training aid for the sport of orienteering and a game in the form of a treasure hunt in a huge area of wooded terrain.

A major aim of The Forest, from its earliest version around 1982, has been to help people interpret the contour information in maps. That enables orienteers to navigate without just following roads or streams, it helps hill walkers to avoid getting lost, and more generally it helps anyone reading a map to get the most out of it.

This program includes some non-trivial games and diversions for those who are not orienteers; we will call them explorers, which relates to another version published in the 1980s.

For programmers The Forest also demonstrates a technique for generating vast terrain by an algorithm rather than by storing it in memory or having to download it as a huge amount of data. It is written in JavaScript for an HTML5 web page and the program occupies only just over 200 kilobytes, so it downloads and runs very quickly. Nevertheless it has more than 1,000 sq km of forest to explore (very much more!). The file TerrainGeneration.pdf describes in some detail how the terrain is generated.