Ehh, boob-handling locks of hair, ehh.
Anyway, I'll add that more complex erosional features are a lot harder than they sound...but that can be said for everything in this game.
Basically, what happens now is a procedural fractal is used to generate the elevations, then random river beds are run with the caveat of running from the high mountains down to the seas. Erosion is calculated for those random paths to make sure the rivers aren't going uphill, and then the real rivers are run and filled with water.
The results aren't terribly realistic because that isn't how (water) erosion works. It works now by running things backwards, like "I
want a river here, what does the terrain have to do to facilitate that?"
In order to support intuitive and dynamic water erosion features, like fjords, or rivers that aren't rather canned, Toady would have to implement something along the lines of this:
-Generate base terrain (no soil layers, only solid rock)
-Generate and/or fill water basins (to procedural depths/volumes based on gen settings)
-Generate rainfall values for tiles
//uses base climate rainfall modified by proximity to bodies of water or something like that
-Given the rainfall values and the material of each tile, run erosion simulation that removes/deposits material from/to tiles.
//At this stage, the soil layers are built and fill in basins in the terrain, possibly filling in bodies of water.
This would add dynamic geological features, and allow realistic things to happen, such as under-cutting by erosion, natural waterfalls with appropriate surrounding geology, and drainage systems of tributaries that look real. That is the only way to do things
properly in DF, because the idea is for complex structure to be emergent features. Fjords might happen this way, but you're guaranteed fjords if an ad-hoc glacial erosion step was added before water erosion simulation to carve out the deep and steep gashes needed to create the feature.
I just did some speculative psuedo code, and it isn't pretty. The numbers are pushing 180 billion tile-like objects to check for every loop of the sim (in the worst case I can think of with some rather poorly conceived code, but still). If Toady plans to add plate tectonics and realistic volcanoes and the like, he'd need to rewrite the whole gen system anyway, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility to have realistic geography.
Without knowledge of the guts of the world gen code, it is hard to say with certainty how easy it would be for Toady to add this without rewriting the whole way it works. I think it is likely he would have to, considering the manner in which rivers are made right now. The system was designed from the ground up to deal with generating a fractal terrain, not an erosion sim.
On some level it is kind of a full blown Euler-based fluid simulation (as in the sediments moving, not necessarily the water itself), since the ideal solution is a world space populated by deposit "cubes" that are allowed to move around according to hardness, elasticity, cohesion, and erosional attributes, changing from solid rocks to sediments to rocks again and again. Such a MASSIVE, and I mean MASSIVE undertaking might not even be within the realms of a desktop, even the best in the community.
Though he somehow manages to fit a whole world into a 5 MB file, so...who knows.
Author
Topic: I Like Big Buttes and I Cannot Lie (Read 2859 times)