[qwery]

You can get much more realistic results at a smaller scale for e.g. waterways using iterative methods -- simulating rainfall and erosion. I imagine the same would be true at mountain ranges using some model of your lateral forces to influence the heightmap. The main issue with this will be the computation time, naturally. Not that that should stop anyone, but it's likely the reason you don't see it in shipped games.

[fc417fc802]

Diffusion limited aggregation is another interesting option for mountains assuming you're willing to employ an approach that isn't single pass. However a naive implementation is extremely expensive compared to other iterative options.

To be fair to OP though it doesn't model lateral forces. It just produces a visually plausible result (to my non-geologist eye at least).