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.