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Earthsim versions 1 & 2 were developed from 2006-2012. Combining a high resolution planet simulator with a universe scale rendering engine let Earthsim work as an interactive 3D encyclopedia of the Earth and the surrounding universe.  ‘cut scenes’ or documentaries would get triggered as you explore the living simulated universe.

As so much good work went into the Earthsim project, the original developers have decided to resurrect the project in the form of a game. The game will push out the features of the new Earthsim 3 engine. After the game is released the new engine can also be used to release a new version of the Earthsim 3D interactive encyclopedia, something we always want to make freely available at least in its baseline form.

For this next version we are going to focus on a living green ecology along with the water and weather systems that interconnect with it. Earthsim 3 will have the most advanced simulation we have created so far, one that combines all these elements into one unified interactive playable model.

Earthsim – The Green Machine

Imagine a beautiful living natural landscape, one you can fly over and view from any angle. It’s up to you to keep this world alive.

Can you survive the four seasons, 5, 10, 50 and 100 years? Or go for 1000 years to prove you have what it takes to build a world that can survive?

Rain falls, and water flows over the land as rivers and is absorbed into the soil. Trees grow and lakes form and dry out. Forests grow or die away into deserts.

Aim Of The Game – Build a resilient ecosystem and keep it alive through various levels.

Challenges include tidal waves, drought, volcanoes and meteor strikes.

Two play modes:

Play through

  • Each level consists of a landscape that the player must master and keep alive.
  • Each landscape has its own characteristics and challenges, starting from the simple to the more complex. 
  • Learn the various challenges encountered and build skills as you progress through the game

Build – Share

  • Build / Sculpt your own landscape
    • Utilize living simulation and real-time erosion tools or static feature brush
  • Upload and try out your level with other users
  • View and download top rated levels

Engine

The videos at the very end of this article show early prototype work on the engine used for Earthsim 1 and 2. The engine was advanced for its time, but it has been 10 years and things have moved on. The limiting factor is no longer the ability to render things well, modern GPU’s have that down, the limit is set by the amount of data required to feed the GPU and how detailed that data is. The challenges come from creating and running a rich and detailed simulation engine and feeding that simulation data to the GPU to keep it busy.

Load balancing resources such as memory and compute power between the CPU and GPU is the name of the game.

Simulation

To improve on Earthsim 2 we needed an engine that can run real-time simulations of the surface details of a world – the living plants and animals.

Terrain sim + Water sim + Atmosphere sim -> Biosphere sim

To achieve this aim, Earthsim requires high performance Ocean and Atmospheric simulations that all combine with the Terrain simulation.

Combining all the elements, in real time then provides the rich data to we need for a realistic biosphere simulation. Where is there soil ? Where is there water ? What temperature is the water etc.

The Biosphere simulator manages all the life-forms on the surface of a planet, and what by-products those life-forms create to export back to the landscape, such as ‘Biomass’ that then rots to create more soil to compete the life cycle.

Today on early prototypes of the new engine we can achieve over one million individually simulated life forms on an average modern multi-core CPU. Move to a high end CPU (16 + cores) and you are in the realm of 10 million individual simulated organisms.

Road Map and Benchmark

Running a local planet simulator is one of the most compute intensive, power hungry tasks around. Yet modern PC’s have incredible processing power, we realised that Earthsim is an exciting way to flex that muscle power.

Early work on Earthsim 3’s large scale multi-core fluid simulation

Our long term vision is to enable you to realistically terraform planets. Imagine loading up and terraforming Mars, Venus or any recently discovered exoplanet.

Benchmark

Beyond video encoding, and CG ray tracing there are not many applications that stress modern multi-core cpu hardware, and even fewer that can do it in a real time interactive application. Even the most power hungry modern games are in general more GPU intensive than CPU core intensive. With this in mind, we hope to include a benchmark aimed at high end PC’s in the Earthsim engine and keep improving that benchmark with subsequent releases. The goal is to let users have simulation visualizer that shows what top end CPU’s can do to showcase the power of the latest hardware.

Early images from the new Earthsim 3 engine showing real-time multi-core water and sand simulation.

The 2011 Earthsim 2 planet engine

The videos below show what we achieved with the Earthsim 2 engine from 2011. We expect to go far beyond this with the new engine in the coming years.

At the end of 2011 we had the planet engine able to resolve an earth like planet down to below 1cm of detail. The videos below show some of the work we did on the way to hitting the 1cm resolution milestone.

Putting a an ocean onto the surface of Mars allowed us to clearly see ancient river channels. Three years before NASA made a similar announcement.
Very high resolution simulation and rendering of the planets using the latest satellite scanning data at the time.
Early work on Dinosaur animation blending in 2007. Mainly showing how the Acrocanthosarus can bend its neck left right and roar high and low. Some early herding and predator prey behaviors too.
Some of the pieces we implemented through 2011
From the first time we got the planet rendering down to 10M accuracy

Concept

Game Content

  • Prebuilt game levels you progress through.
  • Build your own levels and share them with others.
    • View & try out the best user created levels.
  • Game Versions
    • Green Machine & Planet Crafter
    • Multi player: Team up with others to manage larger levels and shared planet management and terraforming.

Learning Content

The Original Earthsim featured three types of in house generated content:

  • Encyclopedia Interactive: entries on on plants, animals and geological formations throughout the known universe,
  • News: pieces on discoveries that guide the viewer to and through those discoveries
  • Documentaries: Longer pieces that tie smaller elements together into a bigger user driven hierarchical path through the experience, a guided learning game experience.

As the new game develops we will look into adding learning content back and creating a new updated free version of Earthsim.

All Earthsim content aims to highlight the connections across all disciplines and demonstrate a unified systems view of the universe.

Real World Sims

Earthsim can be used to simulate and project out the environmental impact of various interventions. For future projects we are excited to work with land development teams who are gathering real data to test and further develop the simulator.

Development Blog

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Water

Water forms a big part of the earthsim3 engine. There are two major challenging components to this. Simulating a large amount of interconnected bodies of water in real time Rendering a large scale landscape that has dynamic simulated water on it. Water Simulation Like pretty much everything in the world of computers, the fundamental limit …

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