Procedural Hydrology: Dynamic lake and river simulation (2020)

nickmcd.me

31 points·debone··4 comments

This kind of reminds me of a plot element in Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell". Main character dies, consciousness is uploaded to a computer where he kind of becomes a God. He makes his own world, manifesting the "firmament" (has anyone else noticed that Stephenson loves the word "firmament", not just in this book).

But he creates all this land, and eventually new consciousnesses are uploaded to the same realm and one of the guys was a geologist. He realizes everything isn't real because something like "it's impossible for this type of a mountain to be next to this type of river".

> has anyone else noticed that Stephenson loves the word "firmament", not just in this book

This is the ultimate tangent but yes, I had noticed that. In fact, I was also listening to an interview with Reid Hoffman the other day where I noticed the same thing — he must use the work "firmament" 1000x more than the typical person. And I know he has also talked about how Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash changed his life. Perhaps the influence is so deep that it's changed Hoffman's vocabulary.

Have you read REAMDE? A surprisingly large amount of text was dedicated to literal worldbuilding description of how an MMORPG world was derived from physical principles, geological processes, and so on. I haven't read Fall yet, but that those same physical processes are a big part of it, isn't surprising to me.

Also check out the follow up: https://nickmcd.me/2023/12/12/meandering-rivers-in-particle-...

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