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Author here. This was definitely something I struggled with when creating this simulation. Reasonably fast simulations of tectonics and erosion have already bee
by david_ar 5y ago
Author 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 agoA great job! One of most complex shader that I've found. I like GPU synthetic life projects and building one of them. Can you help me?
- david_ar 5y agoThanks. Perhaps, feel free to send me some more details about it
- sidcypher 5y agoHad to disable IPFS companion for the site because /ipns/davidar.io doesn't resolve (anymore?). It's nice the initial integration was there, though!