Quote Originally Posted by ascanius View Post
Hey Pixie, Thanks for your help. Sadly I've been trying to figure out gplates..... and well I've got a whole new map.
A new map is a good thing!

It's a really interesting program, don't know if you've checked it out yet but I say give it a try.
I concur.

My compliments on the tutorial, your blog helped a ton. The problem I was having with the rot files was a simple one. My text editor deemed rot extensions beneath it's lofty notice and was adamant about deciding which extension to use. In the end I used the humble notepad.
Glad it helped.

Not sure if you know but in the latest version of gplates you can now create and modify the rot file in the program without having to use a text editor, very handy. Do you know if it matters if you save a feature as unkown or fault or coastline? So far it doesn't seem to change anything.
There are a few things like poles or motion paths that have specifically implemented behaviors, but most things are merely informational for the user. That's not to say special behaviors might not be implemented in future versions...

Quote Originally Posted by ascanius View Post
I've had to delete a few plates already because there was no explanation on they formed. They looked good at the beginning and they made sense but once I simulated the movements of the plates I realized they're location and movement was impossible.
How so? There are quite a few seemingly impossible things that crop up, even in animations of real-world tectonic motions. Continents overrunning each other and the like. These could be artifacts of the interpolation or lack of sufficient temporal resolution at critical times when plates are sliding past each other. It could also be unremarked events where small fragments of continental crust sutured together after the close pass. Could also be continental fragments that broke off of one or the other plate in the encounter. The occasional weird, hard to explain event is part of the fun, and pretty realistic. Delete most of them, if there are a lot, but leave one or two, and try to work out an explanation. Now try to figure out how your explanation would effect the terrain.

It's a nifty program if I was confident in my python programing I would totally create an extension that simplifies things a ton.
What sort of extension are you looking at? Tectonic autogeneration of terrain has been done, but there's definitely room for improvement. Carl Davidson has a nice web app in javascript to simulate tectonic motion on a sphere, here. It takes a pretty high-end browser, because it takes advantage of WebGL for client-side processing. Not perfect, but the best of the lot. I know of a couple of similar python apps. One, by the same author as the previous app, is understandably very similar in approach, but it uses python, which you might find instructive. Another, also in python, uses a somewhat different approach, which might be similarly instructive. It also looks like, in some ways, a more interesting approach.

I can't vouch for the python apps, 'cause both of them fail on my computer for one reason or another. YMMV. Tectonics.js, clearly, isn't in python, but it works pretty well, and the javascript code with some glsl mixed in should still be pretty useful to peruse. GLSL is a lot like C(surprise!) and much of js is somewhat similar to python.

I'm not real versed in js or opengl, but I have been able to get a slightly modified version working on localhost. Fun...?

Edit: Does anyone know if it's possible for two plates to fuse into one?
As has already been mentioned, yup. They also split apart again. Not necessarily along the same lines. Laurasia and Gondwana fused to become Pangaea. Pangaea went on to fission into the current collection of continents. North America used to be part of Laurasia along with Europe, and South America used to be connected to Africa as part of Gondwana. India, Australia and Antarctica also used to be part of Gondwana, and India is now fusing with Asia, a former part of Laurasia. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Edit:
This thing took several hours to write overnight and when I posted it, it disappeared into expired token hell.
Hopefully this version managed to cover everything I originally wrote, but I doubt if it's half as clear or informative. My apologies if this is a confusing hash. I really need to start writing my posts offline in TextEdit...