A Simulation of a Living World...
Hi all. Some time ago (maybe a couple months ago), I posted some screenshots of this personal project of mine, a so called "simulation of a living world", where I dreamt of a little game that had a least one toy model of the complexities of a living earth?
Well, I didn't abadon it. It is very interesting to see where a discipline, a tenet, how far it can take you if you take it to very very end.
So, I'm very stubborn, right? My axiom was that noise maps would ONLY be allowed as initial conditions for the causal systems (remember? A dynamic system is something like: x\_t = f\^N(x\_0)? Well, x\_0 is free, a priori. So that's the only affordance I have for noise), and everything else must come from real simulation?
Well, this makes progressing extremely difficult haha. You have to reinvent things from zero. I don't even have an inventory! Nor even a torch! As a player, because, to have a torch, we still have to rederive society!
Still, I want to make you notice a lot of tiny details. I put them in the following images.
For example you may notice the wake entities leave as they travel through water? It is not a rendering trick. Again, following the philosophy to the end, I spent many weeks implementing a proper fluid simulation field for the water.
The same went for the fauna. It is evolved twice: A single evolutionary system. I did not really design any of the fauna (nor the flora) you see in the video. They were evolved in the world itself, in a laboratory, where surviving and reproducing evolve both the body and the brain.
In any case, too many things to write, I leave the video and the screenshots in case it is of any interest to you guys.
[The coastline](https://preview.redd.it/cd8tzq6mvabh1.png?width=2557&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd5d516f099b844a44e3a8667cda9a8315676bde)
[Part of the world map. A 64km2 living, globally simulated world.](https://preview.redd.it/py7uweyuvabh1.png?width=2554&format=png&auto=webp&s=2971b89c5b49a30ed4dd8a163d26a0ecb250f69b)
[Another slice of the world map, with glaciers and snow. As I said many months ago, there are no biomes at all, just the consecution of 22 different earthlike systems](https://preview.redd.it/tqar2g02wabh1.png?width=2557&format=png&auto=webp&s=17f66c4ff208223e76660c8b43d69992f22af2d0)
[Meteorology, for example, is fully simulated, globally](https://preview.redd.it/u13xahjcwabh1.png?width=1839&format=png&auto=webp&s=3debf174b26f254df451ee0fc670534f6da264ef)
[And wherever it snows, it snows, whether you're there or not](https://preview.redd.it/3obtrablwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=3547fc246087bc2e6812e5e119499f7c3f3a2d0e)
[And when it rains, it also rains \(over bodies of water that \*are\* a field fluid simulation\)](https://preview.redd.it/g1jugaqqwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b259519c71746e611a8abdec349a136c5846a88)
[In a sense, there are no \\"river systems\\" as a proper subsystem, it's just a closed water cycle. Rivers are just where water flows.](https://preview.redd.it/06e5nd4vwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=99dec619dd250cdeb3992eba7273b7cedc41c1cb)
[Here, for example, you can see both the wake entities leave when moving though water, and those small wavelike phenomena in the body of the water? They too are part of the physical simulation: They come from the effect of the wind velocity field acting over the water field. The small \\"white cells\\" in some of the coastlines of this little lake are, too, physical, they come from the simulation of the water breaking there. Notice it's just the sides that are against the windwards?](https://preview.redd.it/gaid4vndxabh1.png?width=1846&format=png&auto=webp&s=efb275029195026d1a690811845bce481b6a54b7)
[In any case, I still started working on more gamelike stuff like building, the difficulty is clearly that even these things must be subject to the simulated natural world, and so must suffer from wind and rain and everything, so, progress is very
Hi all. Some time ago (maybe a couple months ago), I posted some screenshots of this personal project of mine, a so called "simulation of a living world", where I dreamt of a little game that had a least one toy model of the complexities of a living earth?
Well, I didn't abadon it. It is very interesting to see where a discipline, a tenet, how far it can take you if you take it to very very end.
So, I'm very stubborn, right? My axiom was that noise maps would ONLY be allowed as initial conditions for the causal systems (remember? A dynamic system is something like: x\_t = f\^N(x\_0)? Well, x\_0 is free, a priori. So that's the only affordance I have for noise), and everything else must come from real simulation?
Well, this makes progressing extremely difficult haha. You have to reinvent things from zero. I don't even have an inventory! Nor even a torch! As a player, because, to have a torch, we still have to rederive society!
Still, I want to make you notice a lot of tiny details. I put them in the following images.
For example you may notice the wake entities leave as they travel through water? It is not a rendering trick. Again, following the philosophy to the end, I spent many weeks implementing a proper fluid simulation field for the water.
The same went for the fauna. It is evolved twice: A single evolutionary system. I did not really design any of the fauna (nor the flora) you see in the video. They were evolved in the world itself, in a laboratory, where surviving and reproducing evolve both the body and the brain.
In any case, too many things to write, I leave the video and the screenshots in case it is of any interest to you guys.
[The coastline](https://preview.redd.it/cd8tzq6mvabh1.png?width=2557&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd5d516f099b844a44e3a8667cda9a8315676bde)
[Part of the world map. A 64km2 living, globally simulated world.](https://preview.redd.it/py7uweyuvabh1.png?width=2554&format=png&auto=webp&s=2971b89c5b49a30ed4dd8a163d26a0ecb250f69b)
[Another slice of the world map, with glaciers and snow. As I said many months ago, there are no biomes at all, just the consecution of 22 different earthlike systems](https://preview.redd.it/tqar2g02wabh1.png?width=2557&format=png&auto=webp&s=17f66c4ff208223e76660c8b43d69992f22af2d0)
[Meteorology, for example, is fully simulated, globally](https://preview.redd.it/u13xahjcwabh1.png?width=1839&format=png&auto=webp&s=3debf174b26f254df451ee0fc670534f6da264ef)
[And wherever it snows, it snows, whether you're there or not](https://preview.redd.it/3obtrablwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=3547fc246087bc2e6812e5e119499f7c3f3a2d0e)
[And when it rains, it also rains \(over bodies of water that \*are\* a field fluid simulation\)](https://preview.redd.it/g1jugaqqwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b259519c71746e611a8abdec349a136c5846a88)
[In a sense, there are no \\"river systems\\" as a proper subsystem, it's just a closed water cycle. Rivers are just where water flows.](https://preview.redd.it/06e5nd4vwabh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=99dec619dd250cdeb3992eba7273b7cedc41c1cb)
[Here, for example, you can see both the wake entities leave when moving though water, and those small wavelike phenomena in the body of the water? They too are part of the physical simulation: They come from the effect of the wind velocity field acting over the water field. The small \\"white cells\\" in some of the coastlines of this little lake are, too, physical, they come from the simulation of the water breaking there. Notice it's just the sides that are against the windwards?](https://preview.redd.it/gaid4vndxabh1.png?width=1846&format=png&auto=webp&s=efb275029195026d1a690811845bce481b6a54b7)
[In any case, I still started working on more gamelike stuff like building, the difficulty is clearly that even these things must be subject to the simulated natural world, and so must suffer from wind and rain and everything, so, progress is very
slow.](https://preview.redd.it/8uo5fe120bbh1.png?width=1840&format=png&auto=webp&s=c73ad8b45c146809842b19f2c6cd0b7a89a901ed)
Last time I didn't feel it was complete enough to show a video on, This time I do. Notice that the game is turn based for now, the hiccups are me doubting what to do. Sorry also for the lack of video editing, I'll too work on that.
[https://youtu.be/m0I1bqd0O-U](https://youtu.be/m0I1bqd0O-U)
https://redd.it/1uno37j
@proceduralgeneration
Last time I didn't feel it was complete enough to show a video on, This time I do. Notice that the game is turn based for now, the hiccups are me doubting what to do. Sorry also for the lack of video editing, I'll too work on that.
[https://youtu.be/m0I1bqd0O-U](https://youtu.be/m0I1bqd0O-U)
https://redd.it/1uno37j
@proceduralgeneration
the search for river generation.
So I've been instinctively trying to find the perfect methods for creating the ultimate final version of landscape creation. It has been a passion project for a long time now. The entire concept started off with something of "my minecraft experience seems like it's supposed to make me not want to play minecraft," type of a deal. as if "The game is designed to be speed run instead of lived inside." while everyone has lives, yes, my ideal game was supposed to be something that everyone has a role to play, and that you're not being left behind by your friends because you didn't get to play a couple of days.
I think part of it was: FOMO
The other part of it was: I want to do my thing.
while for the most part everyone else would regularly do the typical thing on a minecraft server, like speedrun to elytra, my entire goal was to actually live inside of the world, and experience minecraft. everyone else on the other hand kept experiencing it as if they were supposed to go as fast as possible.
my ideal after that was, to create a game with so many infinite possibilities that there could never be an ending to the game. I guess in my discovering what I wanted, I landed on the impossible. To create something that is unbeatable. to create something where there is ALWAYS something to do. something to experience. something to enjoy. There is never someone who has done everything to the point of them leaving the game. There is never something that stops someone from wanting to play the game.
So my first thought was to create something that nobody knows what to do when they join in. No holding hands. No tutorial. Just "you now have knowledge of x thing," and then that can be passed on to other players through community rather than simply "Get good," type of a thing.
part of me wanted to start out with a survival game type of a thing, but with people that showed up to your settlement with the more beds you made, but that eventually turned into a dead end on my side because I didn't want to start working on something like that.
However, this urge to want to make something like that lived on. It keeps me breathing. It keeps me surging forward towards wanting to play god in some manner.
However, minecraft still kept me wanting more. Every time I played the game, even with mods added, I kept feeling like, "it's not good enough,"
That's when I watched someone that was actively trying to make minecraft extremely optimized. they used different tricks to try and stop java rendering everything, and just made it to where it didn't have to render everything, it just rendered everything you could see.
This lead me down a rabbit hole I had no idea I could never get out of. A path of discovering terrain generation, and optimizations.
The first thing was the fact that perlin noise was the first introduction into what terrain generation could do. it's the basics. It's where I started off on my journey. and as a musician, manipulating sound waves was my pride and joy.
So the first thing I want to say is that after watching that video, I went on a hiatus for a while without really thinking much about whether or not I should try to keep going on with this idea. it was mostly time with me spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to mod minecraft myself, but completely failing to understand what was going on with biomes, and why we couldn't have actual continents.
but then I decided I had enough of trying to create everything that way because nothing felt good when I was trying to fill up the minecraft mods with that type of thing.
but then I got into trying to mod a different game, and that's when I learned about grey scale. grey scale images used for determining height maps for real time strategy games helped me realize that my entire idea of how to calculate for height maps put me over the edge as far as understanding fully what to think about when creating height maps.
because of that experience, I started following a tutorial on yt on terrain generation by some indian guy, I can't
So I've been instinctively trying to find the perfect methods for creating the ultimate final version of landscape creation. It has been a passion project for a long time now. The entire concept started off with something of "my minecraft experience seems like it's supposed to make me not want to play minecraft," type of a deal. as if "The game is designed to be speed run instead of lived inside." while everyone has lives, yes, my ideal game was supposed to be something that everyone has a role to play, and that you're not being left behind by your friends because you didn't get to play a couple of days.
I think part of it was: FOMO
The other part of it was: I want to do my thing.
while for the most part everyone else would regularly do the typical thing on a minecraft server, like speedrun to elytra, my entire goal was to actually live inside of the world, and experience minecraft. everyone else on the other hand kept experiencing it as if they were supposed to go as fast as possible.
my ideal after that was, to create a game with so many infinite possibilities that there could never be an ending to the game. I guess in my discovering what I wanted, I landed on the impossible. To create something that is unbeatable. to create something where there is ALWAYS something to do. something to experience. something to enjoy. There is never someone who has done everything to the point of them leaving the game. There is never something that stops someone from wanting to play the game.
So my first thought was to create something that nobody knows what to do when they join in. No holding hands. No tutorial. Just "you now have knowledge of x thing," and then that can be passed on to other players through community rather than simply "Get good," type of a thing.
part of me wanted to start out with a survival game type of a thing, but with people that showed up to your settlement with the more beds you made, but that eventually turned into a dead end on my side because I didn't want to start working on something like that.
However, this urge to want to make something like that lived on. It keeps me breathing. It keeps me surging forward towards wanting to play god in some manner.
However, minecraft still kept me wanting more. Every time I played the game, even with mods added, I kept feeling like, "it's not good enough,"
That's when I watched someone that was actively trying to make minecraft extremely optimized. they used different tricks to try and stop java rendering everything, and just made it to where it didn't have to render everything, it just rendered everything you could see.
This lead me down a rabbit hole I had no idea I could never get out of. A path of discovering terrain generation, and optimizations.
The first thing was the fact that perlin noise was the first introduction into what terrain generation could do. it's the basics. It's where I started off on my journey. and as a musician, manipulating sound waves was my pride and joy.
So the first thing I want to say is that after watching that video, I went on a hiatus for a while without really thinking much about whether or not I should try to keep going on with this idea. it was mostly time with me spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to mod minecraft myself, but completely failing to understand what was going on with biomes, and why we couldn't have actual continents.
but then I decided I had enough of trying to create everything that way because nothing felt good when I was trying to fill up the minecraft mods with that type of thing.
but then I got into trying to mod a different game, and that's when I learned about grey scale. grey scale images used for determining height maps for real time strategy games helped me realize that my entire idea of how to calculate for height maps put me over the edge as far as understanding fully what to think about when creating height maps.
because of that experience, I started following a tutorial on yt on terrain generation by some indian guy, I can't
remember his name, but it was a great tutorial on generating tiles, and calculating the height map using perlin noise.
however, the fact that it used octaves made me think even further. actually, I don't think that people are really thinking of noise octaves in the right manner. from my perspective, what people call octaves in noise generation, I prefer to thing of as timbre.
timbre is a thing in music that gives each instrument its unique noise wave that allows you to hear them as a different musical instrument. that's why oboes, and clarinets have different sounds to them. However, the way that those sound waves differ from one another, even though they're playing the same notes is how the overtones (which I guess you could call octaves in a manner of speaking) resonate on top of the pitch which is mostly heard. I guess the wave with the most amplitude.
anyway, this entire thing where the guy starts explaining his tutorial gets me on my war path with terrain generation. mainly, my idea is to now create an entire earth sized planet game. The tiles are generated with the radius of the earth's distance away from the origin of the 3d space, and the gravity falls towards that point in space for your character. using the optimization tricks, you can fully actualized that ideal world creation to a T. There's just one problem.
Perlin noise sucks. Perlin noise sucks in genral if it's used by itself, and it also sucks when you put "octaves," on top of it. you can polish a turd, but a turd is still a turd. Anyway, the fact of the matter is, I wanted erosion. I wanted fast erosion. I wanted erosion that didn't crap on performance, and I wanted erosion that also looked amazing.
That's when I discovered runevision's erosion technique. All of a sudden, I was knocking on the door to something incredible. Runevision's erosion technique really gave me inside on some ideas for how to generate mountains in a way that wasn't just fast, but really good to look at. The mountains look great, the ideal erosion technique was finalized right?
well yes, and no.
to give credit where credit is due, runevision's erosion technique goes far and beyond anything that really was able to create erosion to a level that really started to express real live erosion.
At the same time it was lacking something that I couldn't overlook. While it was able to create the perlin mountains that we had before, it couldn't create mountains that felt like they had real life structure to them. So I started going a little bit too deep into this. The problem. The real problem to solve. part of the problem is rivers. drainage. the whole shibang, but I needed something to start out with.
https://preview.redd.it/8k8n7j4bncbh1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4f591c7bb8a1851ab0ae02e5bb6a954ce16e676
what we're looking at here is a map of the canadian rockies. My idea was to start studying them to try and find patterns in them that gave me a little bit more insight into what is going on.
a little bit of an aside, I tried creating a world generator before this that actually introduced me to the concept of voronoi noise. The generator stopped working after a while, and I couldn't get the faces of the voronoi noise to render, so I gave up on that project.
However, because I had an idea of voronoi noise, and I started looking top down on this portion of mountains I started seeing the pattern.
https://preview.redd.it/pe41jsl4ocbh1.png?width=460&format=png&auto=webp&s=a67ceec26681e3593d6c08b70f1a3ad82a37b1df
in red is something called the rocky mountain trench. It's a geological phenomenon created by the suturing of 2 landmasses together. This crack that is highlighted in the picture is probably going to be something that eventually helps split the next super continent apart. right now it's just lifting up from the movement of the north american plate.
(While I understand that it was also at one point another slip fault where the other plate was moving north, it definitely has terrain there that stopped moving to the north while the north
however, the fact that it used octaves made me think even further. actually, I don't think that people are really thinking of noise octaves in the right manner. from my perspective, what people call octaves in noise generation, I prefer to thing of as timbre.
timbre is a thing in music that gives each instrument its unique noise wave that allows you to hear them as a different musical instrument. that's why oboes, and clarinets have different sounds to them. However, the way that those sound waves differ from one another, even though they're playing the same notes is how the overtones (which I guess you could call octaves in a manner of speaking) resonate on top of the pitch which is mostly heard. I guess the wave with the most amplitude.
anyway, this entire thing where the guy starts explaining his tutorial gets me on my war path with terrain generation. mainly, my idea is to now create an entire earth sized planet game. The tiles are generated with the radius of the earth's distance away from the origin of the 3d space, and the gravity falls towards that point in space for your character. using the optimization tricks, you can fully actualized that ideal world creation to a T. There's just one problem.
Perlin noise sucks. Perlin noise sucks in genral if it's used by itself, and it also sucks when you put "octaves," on top of it. you can polish a turd, but a turd is still a turd. Anyway, the fact of the matter is, I wanted erosion. I wanted fast erosion. I wanted erosion that didn't crap on performance, and I wanted erosion that also looked amazing.
That's when I discovered runevision's erosion technique. All of a sudden, I was knocking on the door to something incredible. Runevision's erosion technique really gave me inside on some ideas for how to generate mountains in a way that wasn't just fast, but really good to look at. The mountains look great, the ideal erosion technique was finalized right?
well yes, and no.
to give credit where credit is due, runevision's erosion technique goes far and beyond anything that really was able to create erosion to a level that really started to express real live erosion.
At the same time it was lacking something that I couldn't overlook. While it was able to create the perlin mountains that we had before, it couldn't create mountains that felt like they had real life structure to them. So I started going a little bit too deep into this. The problem. The real problem to solve. part of the problem is rivers. drainage. the whole shibang, but I needed something to start out with.
https://preview.redd.it/8k8n7j4bncbh1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4f591c7bb8a1851ab0ae02e5bb6a954ce16e676
what we're looking at here is a map of the canadian rockies. My idea was to start studying them to try and find patterns in them that gave me a little bit more insight into what is going on.
a little bit of an aside, I tried creating a world generator before this that actually introduced me to the concept of voronoi noise. The generator stopped working after a while, and I couldn't get the faces of the voronoi noise to render, so I gave up on that project.
However, because I had an idea of voronoi noise, and I started looking top down on this portion of mountains I started seeing the pattern.
https://preview.redd.it/pe41jsl4ocbh1.png?width=460&format=png&auto=webp&s=a67ceec26681e3593d6c08b70f1a3ad82a37b1df
in red is something called the rocky mountain trench. It's a geological phenomenon created by the suturing of 2 landmasses together. This crack that is highlighted in the picture is probably going to be something that eventually helps split the next super continent apart. right now it's just lifting up from the movement of the north american plate.
(While I understand that it was also at one point another slip fault where the other plate was moving north, it definitely has terrain there that stopped moving to the north while the north
