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Neat. I’ve been looking for something like this for gamedev — being able to model pseudo-realistic simulation of planetary evolution (for my interest, just star
by setr 5y ago
Neat. I’ve been looking for something like this for gamedev — being able to model pseudo-realistic simulation of planetary evolution (for my interest, just starting at plate tectonics and going up until wind patterns) to provide a “basis” for further simulation.
It’s surprisingly hard to google though; almost all content is simple perlin noise generation that looks kind of correct but ultimately produces total nonsense (so any further derived rules have to also be total nonsense) — generally constrained with further nonsense rules to produce higher level concepts like “animals” and “biomes” that can’t be touched meaningfully.
Other material I can find is far too involved, and far too slow — targeting actual simulation of the earth. The few that do it with the goal of “just realistic enough” still end up being 10+ minutes generation time for small worlds. Modeling erosion processes being the main culprit, afaict.
Definitely stealing this one, for all my nefarious deeds.
- Datagenerator 5y agoSome very detailed algorithms here [1] 1) https://github.com/DokimiCU/mg_tectonic https://github.com/DokimiCU/mg_tectonic
- R0b0t1 5y agoIf you have seen the glacier sims with Elmer, maybe start there and walk back until the simulation is fast.
- david_ar 5y agoAuthor here. This was definitely something I struggled with when creating this simulation. Reasonably fast simulations of tectonics and erosion have already been done before: some parts were tricky to translate to the constraints of a shader, but the parallelism pays off in being able to run the simulation at interactive speeds. The difficult part was the global climate model. I spent a while researching existing methods, but as you say, many of these are computationally expensive scientific simulations. In the end I just downloaded some data for the Earth and went about seeing how well I could replicate climate maps with some simple curve fitting in a Jupyter notebook. After some trial and error, I was surprised to find that you could actually approximate things quite well with sine curves and some blurring, as described in the article. Overall I learnt a lot about Earth systems from this project, it was a fun hobby for a few months. I have some ideas for taking it further, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or want to discuss any ideas you have about it.
- seventytwo 5y agoWhy did you decide to have the life/electricfication spread so slowly relatively to the geological time scale? Was it just to better visualize the changes?
- david_ar 5y agoYeah, I took a bit of artistic license with the timescales, in reality the systems evolve at such different rates that's it difficult to visualise them all simultaneously. Towards the end of the video some of the geological simulations switch off to signal a change in timescale as human populations spread, but it's still not entirely physically accurate.
- dhsysusbsjsi 5y agoYou also missed the bit where the planets billionaires create giant penis rockets
- Dracophoenix 5y agoA question if you don't mind: Did you feel like a god when you wrote all this?
- david_ar 5y agoHeh, I'm not sure how to answer that question. As much of a god as in a god game, I suppose, SimEarth was a big source of inspiration for me. I occasionally get a vague urge to create new life and worlds, which led to this project at a time when that urge was particularly strong. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do worldbuilding with just their minds, I tend to require a computer to do it for me.
- i_am_proteus 5y agobased on what?
- ellis0n 5y ago
- sj4nz 5y agoDwarf Fortress was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. It does do a geology sim for map setup.
- XorNot 5y agoThere's a risk to this sort of thing though: you tend to discover how hard it is to generate a life-bearing planet, depending on your pre-conditions. One of the devs on Star Control 2 put in a bunch of work to automatically generate the map and star systems in it, and during dev ran into the wall that while he could generate too hot or too cold or too dense or too light planets easily, getting interesting and potentially habitable planets out was exceptionally hard - the goldilocks criteria were in full effect and didn't happen too often when randomizing.
- setr 5y agoThat’s part of why I’m only interested in starting at plate tectonics — solving the Goldilocks problem is not that interesting to me, and would require serious effort. But given the right base parameters, I don’t think post-tectonics have the same problem — it’s harder to generate an invalid earth, where earth’s placement in the solar system/universe is hard coded.