All mountain ranges are driven up by lateral forces, so simply look on a satellite image to notice how they are made of ranges[0]. I do wonder if this propensity can be introduced to the code.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains#/media/File...
I can look at real terrain and do a pretty good job of judging whether it will be easy/hard/impossible, I've never seen a game map where that was true.
Notice the cars in the foreground for scale.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains#/media/File...
I imagine that, analogous to work done in weather forecasting, someone can shove DEM files into the pattern-matching engine of an AI, but I do wonder how feasible a completely algorithmic model will be.
I don't know what tech they're using, but it does have erosion, water flow and sediments, plus others. I see they're planning a paid version with more features this year. I've only played an alpha some time ago, but it should be possible to export the maps to use in other programs.
To be fair to OP though it doesn't model lateral forces. It just produces a visually plausible result (to my non-geologist eye at least).
(def octaves 4)
(def lacunarity 2.00)
(def persistence 0.50)
(def period 100)
(def height 40)
(plane y (fbm octaves :f lacunarity :gain persistence perlin p.xz period * height)
# try s/color/shade on the line below
| color (ss p.y -20 0 blue (ss p.y 0 20 green white))
| slow (20 / height)
| intersect (sphere 200))
Also while this uses 2D perlin noise -- you're just changing the height of a plane -- you can create some pretty detailed neat "rocky" terrain effects by using 3D perlin noise instead. Change "p.xz" to "p.xyz" to see what that looks like.
I think the best material out there was from Red Blob Games (developer of the original Realm of the Mad God), which has some old but very complete material on procedural generation, including adding rivers, biomes, using Perlin noise and Voronoi polygons
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
It’s especially egregious in this case because the post is about something visual. The art is built-in! Why oh why.
On the practical level, Simplex noise is also faster and generalizes to n-dimensional noise easier.
To make this place easier to visit and explore, we could make a digital copy of our planet Earth and somehow expose the contents of the multimodal language model to everyone in a familiar, user-friendly UI of our planet.
We should not keep it hidden behind the strict librarian (AI/AGI agent) that imposes rules on us to only read little quotes from books that it spits out while it itself has the whole output of humanity stolen.
We can explore The Library without any strict guardian in the comfort of our simulated planet Earth on our devices, in VR, and eventually through some wireless brain-computer interface (it would always remain a game that no one is forced to play, unlike the agentic AI-world that is being imposed on us more and more right now and potentially forever)
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might be interested in: https://jangafx.com/software/geogen
(Haven't used it myself, but I understand their EmberGen tool is well thought of in visual fx)
Much simpler than using opencl or cuda.