He said the game is mostly a simulation, but there are also “Easter egg components.”…

To make something like this, he said he first needed the physics of the event itself to model the landslide and the wave it generated. That information came from a paper nearly 20 people from the science community co-authored, including Lynett.

“You can’t do that with AI. You can’t do that with graphic artistry. You have to do that with modeling them the way we did when we create tsunami inundation zones. It’s the same models that we use. It’s engineering level. It’s design level physics,” he said.

From there, he said graphics artistry is needed. And then all of the scene components can be brought together to make the game playable.

Source [web-archive]

Thank you… heartfelt…

Patrick Lynett, a USC civil engineering professor, said when it comes to natural disasters, training people how to react is important, and one way to do that is through digital work like the simulation and video game he created that depicts what happened.

I think that if you’re in a boat right next to the initiation of a 328-foot-high megatsunami, going 1,578 feet up a rock cliff, as the video portrays in the game, you’re probably just pretty much boned.

EDIT: Not nearly as big, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

The Vajont Dam as seen from the village of Longarone in 2005, showing roughly the top 60–70 m (200–230 ft) of concrete. The wall of water that overtopped the dam by 250 m (820 ft)[1] and destroyed this village and all nearby villages on 9 October 1963 would have obscured virtually all of the blue sky in this photo.[4]

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1eb406f1-849d-4e96-b89a-78f9ace2911f.jpeg

Like, someone standing there and looking up at that wave is just pretty much boned.

So when you go to the Eddy, which is the big wave tournament that runs on North shore if the waves are 40ft plus, like, once a wave starts getting above a certain size it starts changing behavior in weird ways. Like I can remember during the last Eddy when the waves were 50ft plus, they would get like, little cracks or rivers forming on their face as they continued to gain size but were also falling apart as they did so. It was truly bizarre and surreal and even more surreal to watch surfers ride the face of something the size of an apartment building.

I’ve heard they get bigger in Portugal, but I’m pretty sure it’s close to the natural limit of how big a non tsunami wave can be. And tsunami waves are very different than sea waves in their structure. Still, it’s one of the only times you can get close to wave like the one in the sim.

The game is not yet available to the public, but he is working on making it available on Steam for free, he said.