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[Jeoshua]

Ooh, ooh... My money would go to Tectonic plate activity.  Slice biomes down the middle and fold according to the shift.  Bonus donation if occasionally they slip and deconstruct everything in the area (that isn't quake-proof)

[NW_Kohaku]

Ooh, ooh... My money would go to Tectonic plate activity.  Slice biomes down the middle and fold according to the shift.  Bonus donation if occasionally they slip and deconstruct everything in the area (that isn't quake-proof)

That's more of a natural disaster.

Geologic formations would be more something of an utter mystery to dwarves, since, after all, the world is only 1050/500/125/5 years old.  Clearly, the world was created with light en-route from the stars that were millions of light years away.

The game's ability to build worlds itself is not bad.  On a macro-scale, they are pretty much fine. 

It's only when you zoom in that things look odd.  Layers and biomes end along slightly randomized lines, sort of like the Gods built the world out of jigsaw puzzle pieces that were made of different materials.  (Or maybe I should change that metaphor to "made out of different colors of Legos".)

Rivers are procedurally determined to follow one specific path based upon a starting height and the nearest local low point, and won't bother to check if there happens to be a mountain in the way - it will cleave a sheer cliff through the whole mountain if it needs to. 

In short, geology on a macro level looks like it was formed.  Geology on a local level looks like it was created.  That can change, however, if there are better rules for how rivers flow before they have a chance to start carving through mountains. 

[Jeoshua]

No, Legends clearly speaks of times before the Age of Myth.  I mean, since there are beings that are born in the year "-268" or some such, obviously the universe was not created at that time.  Year 0, Age of Myth, is not the start of the universe, it's the beginnings of recorded history and civilization.

Dwarves would have been around, living underground, before the Age of Myth began.  It would only be relatively recently that anyone began writing anything down, but there would have been an oral history before then, similar to that of real world traditions.  For example, The Holy Bible was passed down by word of mouth between Hebraic communities since before anyone knew what writing even WAS, then when they reached Babylon, someone wrote it down.  So I'm pretty sure that someone would have mentioned "Armok's Wrath" in reference to the earth moving, a time or two.  Even if it would be ancient myth to the Dwarves, I'm sure they tell the stories to this day.

Anyways, yeah earthquakes are more of a natural disaster than a formation, but Tectonic Plates, which are EXTREMELY formative things for minerals and geology, lend themselves very handily towards their existence.  And if we don't have tectonic plates, I think we can throw out the idea of having anything remotely resembling an earth-like geology.

[NW_Kohaku]

No, Legends clearly speaks of times before the Age of Myth.  I mean, since there are beings that are born in the year "-268" or some such, obviously the universe was not created at that time.  Year 0, Age of Myth, is not the start of the universe, it's the beginnings of recorded history and civilization.

Anyways, yeah earthquakes are more of a natural disaster than a formation, but Tectonic Plates, which are EXTREMELY formative things for minerals and geology, lend themselves very handily towards their existence.  And if we don't have tectonic plates, I think we can throw out the idea of having anything remotely resembling an earth-like geology.

That -268 year old being you talked about in that other thread is a bit of a bug, I'm pretty sure.

Creatures are spawned on year 0.  If you have a short history, they will tell you that the dwarf "has the appearance of one that is 68 years old" because they were spawned already 63 years old.  That's just the limitations of the game in a sense, but it is also reflected in the way that the game plays out.

Regardless, tectonic activity depends a bit on the specific convection currents of the magma beneath the tectonic plates, but geologic time still takes something on the order of several million years to move a continent on a scale large enough that it would actually shift anything on the scale of an embark tile. 

That is a timescale outside of worldgen's capabilities. 

You can simulate the effects of tectonic activity, but it would not really have anything to do with the actual formation of continents in the worldgen.

Can we have geologic faultlines?  Yes, that is exactly what the different layers have to be in order to make sense, but that doesn't mean we are talking about tectonic activity actually taking place, that just means we are simulating the results. 

[Jeoshua]

By that logic, erosion - which is performed already in worldgen - is outside of it's time-frame, too.  I'm not suggesting that plates slip as much as 1 km a year or anything.  Rather that when a world is randomly generated, plates are generated along with the height maps.  Then, some wizardry is performed with code (of the variety I am not conversant enough in to get into detail with), and the plates shift, folding the layers beneath them and shifting the landscape accordingly.  This would represent millions of years of tectonic shift, and would take place LONG before any creatures were spawned on the map.

I am reminded of a discussion I had in the Elder Scrolls forums, long ago.  I took the stance that the universe of TES was one much like our own, and tried a very Dwemer-esque way of explaining the heavenly bodies in that world.  My contention is that they were stars, far away.  Others were of the more literallist school.  They said that the stars were merely points of light on a flat, black expanse.  If you looked into what they were saying, they were saying that it was a game and the sky was just a .bmp image file with some white dots.

I prefer to look beyond the game into the fiction.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think there is a bit of a miscommunication here, because I am agreeing with you in places where you seem to think I am disagreeing.

I am saying there should be "wizardry" creating folding and the like along the different "platelets" of the different biomes that have different layers.

I'm simply saying we should just be using the already-existing "fault lines" of where the stone in the depths of the earth change from granite to gneiss when you are traveling from east to west are the already-existing "fault lines". 

Real tectonic plates perform subduction, as I made a section about in the first post, and in those areas, one continental plate is raised up over the other.  These don't create little bumps in the land, these create mountain ranges. (The Andes, the Alps, the Himelayas, etc. all mountain ranges are created by this process.)  This is where mountain ranges come from, already.  You can just assume those are where the fault lines are by the geological processes we already have in the game. 

You don't have to add something into the game artificially after the geology has been set down - it's already there.  Those areas where there are shifts in the native bedrock stone or where the mountain ranges and volcanoes form already are our "fault lines", and the "wizardry" can just be cast upon those areas that are volcanically active enough or are placed upon the implied fault lines.

[Jeoshua]

Maybe not every biome division, tho.  For example, there are many biome "faults" that differ on each side only by savagery or vegetation, or something else equally unimportant, yet the RNG makes them have different layers.  This should probably stop, or at least not be the rule.  Imagine having a region with 2570 fault lines.  Unless these faults were ranked in importance in some way, any realistic simulation of their effects on the surrounding terrain would lead to way more mountain ranges than we have now.  Also, in reality, biomes are often the same on both edges of a fault line, with the possible exception of truly spectacular subduction rises like the Himalayas.

If there is a complete overhaul of the minerals and fault lines are included, it might be better to generate and simulate them separately from the biomes.  The biome differences in minerals, which are already in, would probably be better served realistically by allowing a variance of the type of rock present near the surface.  The hard divisions of these lines should probably disappear, to bring them closer in line with reality.

[NW_Kohaku]

Obviously some fault lines are more "important" than others - a visible change in the geologic basement inherently implies a point where the land itself has shifted over time, excepting intrusions that occur within a plate.

This doesn't make it the same thing as a subduction fault line, where a mountain range takes place, in any way, however.  This just means that those are the areas where you apply the pressures that cause minor local folding from the impacts of the plates.  Once again, the mountain ranges already are the result of massive-scale folding. 

Mountain ranges only occur in the two cases of being on the edge of a continental plate, or being a volcanic hotspot like Hawaii, where the same volcano keeps erupting in different locations as the plate that covers the hotspot shifts.

You don't need to do anything to model these massive subductions or folds (other than potentially make them more volcanically active than they otherwise would be), because the mountain ranges, once again, already are the result of large-scale folding.

[Jeoshua]

One thing I'd love to see in this vein is mountains that don't do this:

Code: [Select]


    /-\
   /---\
  /-----\
 /-------\
/---------\

But, instead, do this:

Code: [Select]

    /^\
   //^\\
  ///^\\\
 ////^\\\\
/////^\\\\\

I realize that's, basically, what we're talking about.  I just wanted to make a graph of it.

[Uristocrat]

Ooh, ooh... My money would go to Tectonic plate activity.  Slice biomes down the middle and fold according to the shift.  Bonus donation if occasionally they slip and deconstruct everything in the area (that isn't quake-proof)

While disasters would be cool, I'm not sure if they fit into that release, exactly.

Simulating tectonics a bit more in terms of the resulting geology would be cool, though.  And I sure wouldn't mind getting chasms back, though all hell might break loose.  Literally.

[Jeoshua]

Chasms are nice, too.  Basically, what this would be is two plates that pull apart from each other, then partially collapse back in from the top.

Code: [Select]

-----||-----
     ||
    /  \
   |    |
   |    |

There would be very thin skin of a rock layer at the top, but underneath there is the gap.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there WERE chasms in the old 31.01 version weren't there? Meaning they were in the 3d version rather than just the 2d.  Because if they were in the 2d version, we already somewhat have those in the form of caves. If right means down in 2d, that means the chasm was merely a layer of emptiness.

[NW_Kohaku]

Chasms are nice, too.  Basically, what this would be is two plates that pull apart from each other, then partially collapse back in from the top.

Code: [Select]

-----||-----
     ||
    /  \
   |    |
   |    |

There would be very thin skin of a rock layer at the top, but underneath there is the gap.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there WERE chasms in the old 31.01 version weren't there? Meaning they were in the 3d version rather than just the 2d.  Because if they were in the 2d version, we already somewhat have those in the form of caves. If right means down in 2d, that means the chasm was merely a layer of emptiness.

There weren't in 31.01, but there were in 40d and earlier. 

In the old 2d version, they were a feature on every map (the second of four obstacles on the map).  Chasms were fairly easy to bridge, but monsters spawned from them (unless you filled them with magma).  In a sense, the three layers of caverns (and HFS) now replace the four old 2d game obstacles.  They even have enemies that grow progressively stronger the deeper down you dig, the way that the obstacles in 2d behaved, recreating the gamey feel of 2d. 

When you think about it like that, the caverns of .31 are a step back in the direction of being a game again, like it was in 2d.  Ever since the game started going 3d, everything being put into the game was making the game progressively more realistic; More of a "Fantasy World Simulator", and less of a game. 


Anyway, a chasm where the earth pulls apart can happen in the right places on the planet, such as Iceland, where the island really is on top of two plates pulling in opposite directions.  Thing is, though, those chasms aren't very deep - bottomless pits don't exist in real life, there's either a bottom, or you're just staring into outer space.  The holes get filled, and if the holes are deep enough, they get filled with magma that cools and forms new stone.  If they aren't that deep to begin with, they get filled with sediment that gets compacted into forming new sedimentary stone.  Either way, the hole gets filled until it's a fairly small hole.

[Setharnas]

While I would love to see a more realistic tectonic system myself, I really wonder - for my own reasons, too, actually - how it could be put into code that is anywhere close to efficient. The way I see it, the most likely way the world is created is through a (adapted) perlin noise application, pretty much the standard tool for the job and something I have recently started to study for my own use. Unfortunately, while that is well suited to getting pseudo-random, continuous subvolumes inside the main volume, I don't see (yet) how it could easily be adapted to shift those volumes around in order to simulate tectonic movements. I'd love a pointer to a solution to that particular problem.

[Jeoshua]

Simple enough.  Perlin noise first, write the data as a height map, THEN do tectonic deformation on it.  I've seen it done with map generators for other games and general game-creation software. 

[Setharnas]

Hmm, yeah, sounds good. I have to admit, I was more thinking towards a higher dimensionality on the PN and failing to see how that could be made controllable and efficient enough... Of course a multi-step solution is the way to go. Thank you.