Earthsim Pre Alpha: update June 2022
- First basic version of land Editor for testing
- Load/Save sim files
- Create and modify ‘layers’ of land edits that are applied to the land.
- Export landscapes as png height maps
- Terrain Model
- Real-time Sand, Earth, Gravel slippage
- Thermal rock erosion into Gravel
- Water dynamic flow
- Simple atmosphere model
- Water evaporation is a constant affected by temperature
- Temperature is constant over the land and falls off by land height
- Visualizer
- High performance tile landscapes
- Realtime edge cross sections
- Basic lighting/shadows
- Simple HDR/Tone mapping
- Simple background clouds and skybox generation
Earthsim Alpha: Q1 2023
- Plants & Trees that grow and spread depending on soil and rock types
- Simple gameplay model
- sim – water ground penetration and subsurface water flow
Feature development track:
- Vegetation
- Users can pick & seed various vegetation types anywhere within a radius and see things start to grow. Seeds get dropped, fall downhill and are also moved by water flow (some seed types are more adapted to water transport).
- Seeds only germinate if conditions are right so plants spread over the land by where they like to grow. Water, temperature and soil quality factors all are processed in the germination and growth models.
- Ongoing enhancements for updates:-
- sim – clouds and rain
- sim – water velocity erosion
- vis – grass renderer
Machine Specs
Minimum Spec
CPU: 4 Core with AVX2, 8GB Main memory
GPU: Discrete GPU with 4GB memory
This spec can handle landscapes up to 4k in real time, though 2k landscapes will be more comfortable at high fps.
Recommended Spec
CPU: 8 Core with AVX2, 16GB Main Memory
GPU: 8 GB memory
This spec can handle landscapes of up to 8k in real-time. All game levels will run very well with this spec:
The Green Machine (TGM) is a survival simulation game. This game is a single player game but also has interesting possibilities for multiplayer collaborative play and construction in future versions. We are excited to create a distributed blockchain based multiplayer implementation after the TGM 1.0 single player version.
Beyond playing the game, if you are intending to use Earthsim for editing and simulation of extra large landscapes (16k and 32k) in real time – 60Hz framerates, 16 or more cores are required.
A GPU with more than 8 GB memory and higher performance will enable higher res rendering and higher resolution atmosphere/smoke/clouds for volumetric atmospheric raytracing effects.
Simulating Planets
Our long term goal with the engine is to explore gamified but realistic real-time interactive planet simulations so users can create unique planets from scratch or terraform from existing known planets as a starting point.
Today with a 16 core processor we can comfortably simulate a single 8k landscape tile at high framerate. To turn that single tile into a planet we need multiple tiles depending on spherical projection type. We use either a cubic (six tiles, one for each cube face) or icosahedral (10 tiles, one tile for two icosahedron triangle faces).
The Earthsim 2 engine used the icosahedral projection, if we use the same for Earthsim 3 that means we need ten tiles of landscape simulation to makeup a planet.
At todays processor speeds that means we can easily do planets of ten 2k maps on regular gaming boxes. Ten 4k maps would need a 16 core high end cpu. These two configurations would be the target simulation resolutions of a future planet simulation based game.
At the high end, ten 8k maps could run on a 64 core cpu, which may stretch to ten 16k maps, but probably would not make 60 fps at that size.
Get Involved
If you are interested in Earthsim and think you have the skills to help. We are looking for an artist & an engineer (ideally with physics experience) to join the team.
Discord server: https://discord.gg/h8aDJthTk5
Earthsim 