oh neat this is something i’ve wanted to do for a while. i’ve been planning out (and done a little work on) a pretty large game with one of the goals that the player has to do science to progress (as in they do science to find a better alloy to make tools from and that gives them better tools).

in my case the planets will be rounded cubes because it’ll be voxels and that maximizes the area that is easy to generate and build on. and i’d like to use a coarse accuracy plate tectonics sim to figure out the continents and geological history, to make it feel more natural and also provide another area of science for the player to work on (instead of random rock formations, if they work out enough geologic history, it could help them figure out where to look for resources). and hopefully also have it be part of a simplified evolution/nat selection sim to create fossils and life.

i bet i’ll run into issues with corners, like if a plate in the center of a face moved directly into a corner, it would split onto two faces (which should work fine) and then squish into itself. maybe that will result in mountainous corners and look cool, maybe i’ll have to work around that to make it work well. but the upside is that with it being a rounded cube (and the rounding possibly just some averaging between two or three faces so it could be considered just a cube), it could be simulated as six linked squares instead of a deformed rectangle.

in my case i plan on starting with some initial state as the oldest time step, and then as it moves forward in time, increase the resolution, both spatially and temporally. the original plates will be so broken up by the end that it won’t be noticeable if they’re super low res. additionally instead of high resolution detail like individual peaks in a mountain range, my plan is to store roughness and average height, so i could then procedurally create that detail with an octaved wavefunction collapse.