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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone has generated planets by running a geological simulation - plates, subduction zones, vulcanism, erosion.... etc.

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That would be interesting. I had a quick look and found this paper, they simulate tectonic plate movement for terrain generation:

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~cutler/classes/advancedgraphics/S13/f...

and this one looks like some sort of terrain generation based on erosion:

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

Actually, it just occurred to me that what would be really cool would be a geology version of the Star Walk app - you point it at the ground/hill/mountain and it shows you what its made up of.

Explaining the history of features would be even cooler :-)

And imagine if you had a game that generated terrain by erosion + tectonic plate movement, and you got to see a visualisation of that as it was generating :) 2 billion years of geological activity, simulated in a minute-scale.

42!

This is roughly the premise of the Neal Stephenson novel Reamde. There's a virtual world named T'Rain after the terrain generation algorithm used to create it.

Dwarf Fortress does.

Does DF actually generate the geology of the whole planet, rather than just the playable area?

The entire planet!

You select the area you'll be playing with at the embark, so yes, the whole planet's surface is generated. But I apart from the surface layer, I doubt that this simulation takes planet core into account, for example: in the game world's it would be filled with SPOILER anyway.

plate tectonics is a planned feature for worldgen in the future

This is the "Simpsons Did It" of video games.

Having used a few cheat codes to instantly see what every voxel is composed of... the generation isn't great. It's just spheres of certain materials, as well as x-shaped veins. It feels natural when you're randomly chipping it out, but when the curtain gets pulled back, it's not as impressive.

I wondered the same thing a while ago, wanting to do so for my own purposes. I found this a while back.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/623145-terrain-generation-with-...

I'm hoping to find time to use it myself, and possible extend it. Thankfully its open source.

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