Could someone technically build Earth to scale, but make it generate procedurally?

I'm not sure how else to expand on this thought I had.

We have games like "the Crew" which play in a small scale USA due to data restrictions. In theory, could they use similar algorithms as No Man's Sky, focus it around one planet earth (and maybe moon) and make an open world at 1 to 1 scale for the full planet?

Yes, but to what end? Would you want it to be Earth but kinda randomized (like say a game of Civilization), or would you want them to incorporate satellite data and weather data to accurately portray the topography and climate of each region of Earth? Terrain and geography aside, procedurally generated games can handle a randomization in physical characteristics, like the terrain and Spore-like creatures of No Man's Sky (and that game is mostly kinda emptyish planets with a bunch of random wildlife), but if you were making this Earth game, would you want it to have procedurally created ecology and evolutionary lines, and cultures and empires, each with centuries or millennia of history? Or would you want them to go The Crew with it and have it be a recreation of existing Earth ecology, weather patterns, nations, culture, cities? Either one is a huge undertaking for present day game developers and it would be difficult to procedurally generate cultures in a way that had any verisimilitude.

Yeah that's the basic tension in the fanbase of most historical games. Is it the endpoint (or any point in history) that matters most or the opportunity to see history unfold along different parameters. Should the player have the ability to do what they want within the confines of gameplay, or should historicity take precedence? I tend to a mixture of both. Historical events happened for reasons out of overriding historical trends, but those are simply conglomerations of individual events that certainly could be altered drastically.

@bisonhero: I think it's a case of the end not really mattering, some innovations could be made in the journey.

I don't think algorithms can randomly generate an exact to scale copy of Earth. Also, I don't think Earth is particularly well balanced or fun enough to play in.

People are already doing just that in various forms. As far as procedural generation of an earth, I think Outerra Engine is one anyone can get access to use.

Likely someone could make a mod to Civilization to make the map some sort of sphere. (Here is a slide show that shows how to make six flat maps into a sphere....then adding various thing to make the planet seem real like contours and weather. https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/earthlike/example/slideshow.html#1 )

In some ways, yes, but not on everything.

We can have procedural generated terrain that matches the size and layout of planet Earth. We can even use weather and topography information as input to make it match our planet terrain and weather. It would be a titanical effort, but it could be done. Then there is the issue of flora and fauna, which have their own set of complex rules. That could also be done, theoretically, since those rules are complex, but deterministic and not really dependent of free will.

Assuming you can build such model, there is something still missing: human civilization. Human civilization obeys rules that are a lot more complex than evolution and migration waves. You can't use something like a procedural algorithm to predict the shape, position and characteristics of cities and other human constructs; so after several IT doctorates thesis worth of research and development, you would end up with an extremely precise reproduction of a natural landscape.

For your example of The Crew, you could end up with a 1 to 1 reproduction of the North American continent, but with almost nothing in it, or with long stretches of nothing interesting. It was the issue of games like Fuel... size doesn't matter as much as density.

It depends on how perfect you want the simulation. Generally, it's easier for a computer to randomly build larger worlds than more detailed ones. With math, we can build an entire universe in seconds, but to procedurally generate a city and have it look good we need more time than that.

Take a perfect simulation as an extreme example. Once we turn the Moon into a computer, perhaps we will be able to simulate everything down to the microscopic and up to the universal levels. For now, however, we have to accept limits. Want something that simulate the entire universe with less detailed planets? There's Space Engine. Want a more detailed planet, but there's only one of them? There's Outerra. Wanna simulate geological processes, geomorphological processes, evolutionary biology, ocean wave and currents, erosion, atmospheric processes and weather, planet and star movement, advanced intelligent beings? Is the resolution of your world measured in inches, feet, nanometers, Planck length? Basically, do you want The Matrix?

The answer to your question is yes, depending on the detail and accuracy of your simulation. You can simulate a single-color Earth-sized ball and get a billion frames per second, with procedural generation choosing the color of the ball. If you want a perfect simulation, however, it will take a long, long, long time for our technology to reach a point where we can procedurally generate and simulate the entire world, perhaps a thousand years. My guess is it will take about 100 years just to have a perfect simulation of the human body, let alone an entire planet. We will all be super dead by then.

As for the actual shape and makeup of Earth, it may be possible to randomly arrive at such a result, but there would be so many factors to weigh in that the odds would be lower than what's imaginable.

god essentially created earth using procedural generation. and also speed tree.

so... you're saying there's gonna be a new SimEarth? :D

Is it procedural if you generate it based on actual topography? I don't think so. Procedural means you create somethinng unique with a set algorithm, building a lego model according to directions isn't procedural, but building something without them is.

You would need an algorithm that can generate planet earth in all it's hyper randomness and complexity, you just couldn't do that with human coding alone. Maybe with machine learning. There's simply no easy pattern to earths formation. You would need a function which generates glacier shaped terrain that has been weathered over a million years, creating mountain ranges but also landmasses like cape cod, i can't even imagine tackling that. Such variety and depth. You could generate like year 1 of planet earth.... Maybe, when it was just molten space rock getting bundled into a planet-like shape.

Edit; You could make a mechanism which takes topography and makes 3D models, that's how alot of people make Cities: Skylines maps. I just don't think that's procedural. Maybe it is.

@mikemcn: procedural generation means something is being built on the fly with algorithms and that something doesn't have to have randomness/uniquness involved. A premade planet can be generated procedurally during gameplay.

I wonder how 1:1 those Truck simulators are.

i'm getting flashbacks of the 4 e3s of Spore presentations and that ambitions that game had.

No, it couldn't happen, even if there was a procedural world there would be staircases that went nowhere, or vents that just went into dead ends because the programs is just building crap without sense of purpose. Disney Infinity 2.0 had a wonderful procedural generating devices for people who didn't want to build, and instead it would build using all the assets but then just start like building a castle off the ground and then just ruining the whole limit on what you can have in the game. And even for the sake of just having a surface to work on, it just became increasingly frustrating compared to using graph paper and crayons since I was 4 and building castles.

Give me a trucking simulator with an exact 1 to 1 scale of the interstates in the US

Only game I would ever need.

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of procedural generation going on here.

Procedural generation is used to create large amounts of content without having to physically model everything. For example, when Minecraft generates a level, it uses formulas to determine what each and every block in the world consists of. These formulas determine the block type by looking at parameters like elevation, surrounding block types, rarity of specific block types, etc. Basically, everything in the world is determined by a set of restricted potentials. After a formula determines what a block is, the identity of that block is stored in memory. Then, when it's generated the entire level, it loads it up and you can play and alter it. In this way, Minecraft can make a near-infinite number of randomly, procedurally generated levels.

What No Man's Sky is doing isn't that far removed from Minecraft, but the difference is that it's generating a whole lot more content and thus can't just store it's generated world in memory. Instead, it streams its content and is permanently in a state of procedural generation. As you move around, those formulas are constantly chugging out the world. Presumably changes to the world are stored in local memory such that the user can have some meaningful interaction with it.

The Earth, on the other hand, already exists. There's no need to procedurally generate it because it already exists. It would be exceedingly difficult to make formulas to randomly generate the Earth because you don't want random, you want the Earth. Procedural generation could certainly be used to make things like weather and earthquakes happen, but the overall geography of the Earth is already determined. It would be far more simple to open up some maps and your game engine and get putting in vertices than it would be to try and make some random noise generating formulas make the shapes of the continents.

Anyhow, if you want a full-scale model of the Earth, one need look no further than Google Earth.

With a large enough dev team, sure you could faithfully recreate Earth. But it won't be procedurally generated.

You could create an earth-like planet with similar shaped continents, but the terrain and other features would be fairly generic.

Some examples:
Dual Universe
Infinity Battlescape

Star Citizen is also using it for their planets. The main challenge is that you need double precision to handle the huge difference in scale. You would also probably need petabytes of data to make a realistic earth.

Huh. I didn't know that. I was under the impression that Minecraft worlds were finite and small like Terraria.

Oh well. Replace any instance of "Minecraft" with "Terraria" in my other post and it's still OK.

Not at all.

One day I will reverse engineer the world so we can see throughout history.

Yeah they really need a balance patch, Can't wait for Earth 1.6.

The reason the Crew is condense is so you don't have a boring 15 hour drive between cool places. Gameplay comes first or should, no matter what the game is.

Minecraft on PC is technically infinite, but practically finite because, as dudeglove said, the game starts to crap out when you've generated landmass equal to about eight times the size of the Earth. It still generates stuff, just not like it's supposed to. I guess you could still say that's practically infinite because nobody's ever going to actually use that much space, even if you could somehow get a server going that could handle hundreds of thousands of people.

Minecraft on anything that isn't a PC is limited. The Xbox One and PS4 versions of Minecraft have some pretty huge worlds and you'd have to be crazy to just run from one end to the other, but someone could conceivably do that in less than a day. It takes, I dunno, 20 minutes to run from one end of a Minecraft world to the other in the 360/PS3/Vita versions of the game.

As far as the thread topic goes - all of the formulas would have to be specifically tailored to create the Earth (also, wouldn't that mean it isn't random?), so I guess you could do it but there isn't really a reason to do it. You could, however, make a virtual Earth-like planet. No Man's Sky seems to have done just that, depending on how "Earth-like" you want to get.

EDIT: Apparently you can't move past the thirty million block anymore. The world renders past that, it just won't let you move past that. That's kind of disappointing, I thought the idea of a world that started to fuck up in unexpected ways at the end was creepy and interesting in a Lovecraftian sort of way.

This breaks my sad little heart.