I'd like to ask a naive question, as I'm not really familiar with procedural terrain generation but I've been curious about it from afar. From what I can tell, most work in this area revolves around manipulating geometric patterns to "look like" mountains/islands/whatever.
Is there any value in modeling geological processes instead? So if you take a flat plane, along with a model of geological forces that could alter that plane, and run some kind of simulation over time (in effect simulating erosion etc), could that not produce a more "realistic" terrain?
I assume it's much more complex, much more computationally expensive, and all that. But I'd be surprised if no one at all has attempted this.
o11c · 27m ago
Well, the article does mention that Part IV adds erosion. Note also that this particular source is a rare example of working based on a mesh rather than a grid (which complicates the logic - in particular, when do you split/merge nodes? - but should be cheaper at scale).
People can try something fully physics-based (or rather, physics-inspired) even for earlier stages, but there are problems:
* You still need some kind of nondeterministic input so you don't always generate the same world.
* You must do the whole world at once, rather than being able to generate each area independently.
* This requires the computation to run for a long time, and needs to feed back in on itself (think of "lake overflows a natural dam and carves a valley, then the tectonics lift it and change the low point anyway").
* It's very easy for your code to result in "boring" outputs, such as "all flat" or "infinitely deep valleys".
ramses0 · 39m ago
There's been a fair number of previous posts which cover that topic:
Is there any value in modeling geological processes instead? So if you take a flat plane, along with a model of geological forces that could alter that plane, and run some kind of simulation over time (in effect simulating erosion etc), could that not produce a more "realistic" terrain?
I assume it's much more complex, much more computationally expensive, and all that. But I'd be surprised if no one at all has attempted this.
People can try something fully physics-based (or rather, physics-inspired) even for earlier stages, but there are problems:
* You still need some kind of nondeterministic input so you don't always generate the same world.
* You must do the whole world at once, rather than being able to generate each area independently.
* This requires the computation to run for a long time, and needs to feed back in on itself (think of "lake overflows a natural dam and carves a valley, then the tectonics lift it and change the low point anyway").
* It's very easy for your code to result in "boring" outputs, such as "all flat" or "infinitely deep valleys".
https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com+procedu...
This one is a particularly useful starting point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196154
It'd be neat to see a game world where the simulation remains ongoing, where the world is actively changing.