Why
This project came to be because I always loved that old cellular automata web game… https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
That amazed me when I was very young. It was so rich in emergent behavior that I spend way too much time tinkering with it.
Now older, I caught my self watching this view randomly some other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggxt06qSAe4 And the simplicity of the implementation made me absurdly curious to make my own!
But now, as a more senior Unity dev I wanted a challenge and I wanted to add my own flair to this, so that I could learn something from it. While researching to see what was out there, I found this amazing video about Noita and their way of simulating a huge powder game world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXuyMCgbTc
That was it! Fuel for my fire.
What is it
So, this project is basically powder game, but implemented to run very fast on the CPU using staggered multi-threaded updating with memory aligned data. I wanted to run a big simulation chunk with many pixels, as well as displaying them pretty. I could add chunk loading and movement in the future, but my focus was to first simulate and run a BIG chunk really well.
I also made it so I could add more particle types easily while keeping them fast and memory efficient.
See it!
Overview:
Gunpowder implementation with fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTuRFAgmswY
Stone maze with interaction between oil, gasoline and gunpowder (all on fire): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFASBCTrLs
Water shading and physics, sand, oil, gundpowder, fire, steam, density tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt9juEbSQZM
Particle states, lightning and conductivity (electricity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGguzLiQZ20
Laser, lightning, steam + rain formation, steam formation from fire and water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOG2PUR8bdI
Electricity igniting stuff and playing around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pFEt_NKYNU