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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

Unless it's modeling islands, I find most terrain generators unnatural, at least from above. I wonder how feasible (and realistic looking) it would be to build a terrain generator using a bunch of fluid simulation to model plate tectonics, weather, and erosion.

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Just tectonics:

- http://davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/blog/

- https://sourceforge.net/projects/platec/

Tectonics with simulated weather:

- http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generati...

Just fluid dynamics:

- http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html

I absolutely love this one:

> http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generati...

There are factors in games that mean something 'real' probably wouldn't result in a great map. Foremost is the fact the real world doesn't care whether or not there are places where a person can get stuck. A game world has be be designed in a way that means the player can't get stuck in places they can go to, and can't go in to places where they could get stuck. Depending on the game type, the map also often acts as a 'corridor' forcing the player to move through a series of locations in order. Features like that move a game map away from something real really fast.

Look into Dwarf Fortress. The world generation is incredibly complex and realistic. The community-driven wiki is helpful as always[1]. Not only is the physical world generation impressive, the generated history and lore is amazing as well.

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Advanced_world...

I wonder if this game would be more compelling if they wrote a renderer that wasn't limited to the resolution of a text font?

I'm sure the current DF fanbase isn't interested and might even be repelled. But I also think it might open it up to a new audience that otherwise hasn't/wouldn't consider it.

Have you heard of Armok Vision? It's a 3D visualizer being developed by modders so that you can view your fortress in 3D (I think even in real-time).[1]

[1]https://github.com/JapaMala/armok-vision

F. Kenton Musgrave has done work on that, starting with this paper in 1989 [1]. Here is a more recent paper which references his work (among many others) [2]. Also [3].

[1] The synthesis and rendering of eroded fractal terrains

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=74337

[2] Terrain generation using procedural models based on hydrology

http://arches.liris.cnrs.fr/publications/articles/SIGGRAPH20...

[3] Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3028601

You may find World Machine interesting: http://www.world-machine.com/about.php?page=features

Unnatural may not be the most accurate term here. It might not be Earth like. But whose to say many terrain generators are completely possible in the real world, in the countless Planets we've yet to see the topography of.

I've looked heavily into implementing this. It would take some years, even with a team.

What about /u/diggernet's examples? Depending on the scale you need, it seems like you can get pretty far with just Javascript in the browser.

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