The blog post and the companion video (and shader source code) explain an erosion technique which emulates gorgeous branching gullies and ridges without simulation, while still allowing every point to be evaluated in isolation, which means it’s fast, GPU-friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks.
The video was really well done, very interesting even though I’m not very familiar with the subject. Is this the sort of thing that would go into a game like No Man’s Sky to improve the planet generation?
In my opinion, any game featuring large-scale, realistic terrain would benefit from a tool like this. You simply can't hand-craft every ridge on a mountain range at that scale. Unless you're recreating a real-world location using satellite and LIDAR height data, procedural filters are the only way to achieve that level of geological detail efficiently.
I imagine lots of games do already, but offline. Most games don’t have gameplay that requires real-time terrain generation. The idea of generating terrain procedurally is not new, but this technique that gets a great-looking erosion effect in real time is.
I'd like to expand with some more details and developments since the post I saw here a few weeks ago about my Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique. (That post (not by me) was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808889)
I've since made it work also in color (RGB dithering and CMYK halftone) and demonstrated what it looks like in true 1-bit (or 3-bit for color) at low resolutions as well. See the linked demonstration video for a variety of styles/aesthetics it can be used for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzjWBmhO_1E
Lots of people both here and elsewhere has speculated about various alterations or different use cases, etc. I'd like to point to this FAQ that have a lot of common topics covered. If you have questions, suggestions or similar, it would be a good idea to check that out first (after the explainer video):
https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D/discussions/12
Furthermore, lots of people have been inspired to make their own implementations, or related effects inspired by Surface Stable Fractal Dithering. I keeping a list of the ones I know about here:
https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D/discussions/14
For example, Aras Pranckevičius got a simplified version of the effect to work on Playdate. Since the Playdate does not have a GPU, the effect (along with 3D rasterization in general) is implemented fully CPU-based here.
https://aras-p.info/blog/2025/02/09/Surface-Stable-Fractal-D...
I've been surprised and happy that the effect has gotten as much interest as it has, and I'm hoping we'll eventually see games released that use this technique.
