lol, i'm not even american

Unless you're planning on starting a revolution tomorrow, i'm still subject to whatever the policies the people in power install, so i'd rather pick the one that harms me and the people i care about the least.

Though i'm not sure why i bother arguing. You people just want to feel superior for doing nothing.

Never said it did. They're two unrelated things. Which is why i don't understand why voting for the "lesser of two evils" means i support them, or capitalism in any way.

This whole argument feels like the old "if you're a communist, why do you have a phone?" thing all over again.

It's like a fantasy author that wrote himself into a corner.

"Hmm, i can't have Jesus and God be different people because i already said there was only one god, but i can't have them be the same person because then he'll be sacrificing himself to himself.

Hm... Demigod maybe? Nah, too cliché, i'll just leave it really vague and let the fans come up with something, maybe add a third character to make it seem intentional" - Some charlatan, 0BC

If not voting helped overthrow the government in any way maybe you'd have a point

I really don't understand what i said that ticked you off this much. I've started this whole discussion by agreeing with you to begin with, geology IS important, and it SHOULD be more prominent in game development. All i wanted to do was give you my input on why it isn't more prevalent, and how things are done currently. In any case, here we go again:

you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development

On the contraire, i like geology, i like your idea,and i agree with you. But when making a game you have 1000 of ideas that are just as good that you need to implement in a short amount of time, with a limited amount of money. Reinventing world generation, as interesting as it is, is simply not usually a priority. I do agree it could improve the game, but i don't think it's fair to act this appalled that it doesn't exist yet the way you imagine.

…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this

In your other comment you asked for a tool that lets you model landscapes by hand, and automatically calculates how that affects tectonic plates. l'm not sure what you think i'm misinterpreting here, this is a complex program that would take several months to make. So either you're asking a big company to make this, in which case, my comment of "most people wouldn't notice/care" applies, as they'd only do that if there's immediate profits, or you're asking open source/independent devs, in which case, don't.

Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?

Okay, so do you think minecraft's world generation is realistic? Because my point was that game balancing often interferes with realism.

Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?

Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn't always conform with one's artistic vision.

There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.

And my point is that shit is hard to make, doesn't scale well with large maps (simulating the plates colliding like you said costs memory and processing power), and wouldn't find an audience because most people can't tell/don't care about the difference.

Look, i'm sorry if i came out as rude, i know you don't mean that every single little detail must be correct just to please you, i get it. My main gripe with your comment is just the "This is so obvious! Why hasn't anyone made this?" attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.

On the game side of things, while i agree more realistic landscapes would be awesome, making games is really hard work and you need to be careful where you'll invest your time in if you want to actually get anything finished. The truth is most people who are not geologists can't tell the difference between a realistic landscape and an unrealistic one.

We have some tools for world generation, though i'm not sure how realistic they are. Mostly a mix of noise functions (Simplex, Perlin, etc) and erosion simulation. But i barely understand how that works, so your "geological sandbox" seems a lot less obvious to me.

Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.

I mean, i'd argue that a car costs a bit more than $150, but i see your point.

Blasphemy!

I love how instead of just saying "[...] if you're still bisexual", he decides to describe various homosexual activities in detail.

We can't keep astronauts aboard the ISS indefinitely, even with constant restocks from Earth, and we're supposed to go even further out of our orbit to the moon or Mars and they're going to be fully independent?

And even so, that might be the easiest part of the whole terraforming thing. It only gets worse from there.