Good terrain generation is not trivial, either at world scale or down at eye level. The straightforward approach yields what you see in the article, a craggy heightmap which looks like almost nothing in reality and isn't particularly interesting to explore.
Dwarf Fortress for example starts with basic midpoint displacement but then does a lot of custom massaging.
This is the entire problem with the game industry.
Nothing shown in this article is even vaguely trivial. The author is very obviously a 100x'er by comparison to almost every human on Earth (with GPU shader rendering specifically). The "straightforward approach"? "Straight forward..."?
Out of 8,000,000,000 humans, what percent of them can implement even the "hello world" steps necessary to start this article? Hey y'all, how many even know what a shader is? There's such a huge amount of OpenGL jobs... ("what's OpenGL, we only use Unity")
How about online gamers? What percent of the 1,021,282 players current online for Counter Strike 2 (7/28/2024, 1:22 PM EST) [1] can even implement the first steps of the shaders necessary for the game they're playing?
What percent even know how to compile a simple command line c++ program or write an even more simplistic Javascript script in a browser? Note, this is vaguely a trick question, as most humans can barely operate email.
Why are we comparing a technical skill to all 8 billion humans on earth. Like you said, if you can make a hello world program, you're probably better than 99% of humans by default at programming. But that's not a very useful metric.
Also, I'm not quite sure how this turned back around to your "thesis". How does this make a problem with the games industry, exactly?
> How about online gamers? What percent of the 1,021,282 players current online for Counter Strike 2 (7/28/2024, 1:22 PM EST) [1] can even implement the first steps of the shaders necessary for the game they're playing?
It's like asking what percent of the drivers can build a diesel engine. And call it "the entire problem with automobile industry".
Sorry, but this is just nonsense. Of course few users can build the thing they use.
I believe his point was this is labeled "straightforward" while being a highly technical subfield of programming, itself a rare profession, that few people could create.
The point, as I see it, is that the combination of skills demonstrated in the article is pretty rare. Most users of the (game) technology take certain things for granted, but they are not trivial, and the number of people who can do these things well is not a few million but possibly a few hundred. And most of these few don't make indie games. Hence the complaints about things not being ideal are, well, not very useful.at best.
Big companies that can afford it overcome this via specialization. An artist who does concept art and general animation may have zero skills writing shaders, etc, thus the rare one-man-show combination of skills is not required.
> and the number of people who can do these things well is not a few million but possibly a few hundred.
I briefly walked through the article and I can confidently say these techniques are well-known among graphics programmers. These days even artists who can't write code know what triplaner mapping and PBR are, even though they can't implement them from scratch.
Doing something "well" is subjective, but there is no chance there are only less than 1000 people who know these.
I'm still thankful to the author for writing these down, of course.
What is the "problem" you speak of in the first sentence? I don't see it explained in the rest of your post.
Are you just pointing out that this is a very specialized field that requires having studied/learned a lot of complex inter-related topics and that most of us have not done so?
Dwarf Fortress for example starts with basic midpoint displacement but then does a lot of custom massaging.