Our new graphics renderer will make hot spots, like those lasered into this planet. This graphics overhaul is a work in progress.
This year's plans include a major graphics overhaul, more realistic collisions & craters, and putting Universe Sandbox on mobile devices so you can create and destroy on the go. Before getting into the details, here’s a brief recap of last year.
Highlights from 2023
Demonstrating highlights from 2023, including a spherical cow and adding materials like methane and nitrogen to planets.
In 2023, we put out 4 feature-packed updates. Some of our favorite new additions include
- Massive improvements to our gravity simulation's accuracy, stability, and performance.
- Adding 8 new materials, including oxygen & carbon dioxide, to realistically simulate, construct, and terraform planets and atmospheres.
- Rolling a Spherical Cow into Universe Sandbox. This refers to a joke that physicists sometimes oversimplify real-world problems to make them easier to solve.
The gravity simulation improvements and additional materials were major milestones from our 2023 Roadmap post. Check out our 2023 Retrospective post for more on what we did last year.
What’s the Plan for 2024?
- Using a new graphics renderer to immerse you further in the universe with bright glows, smoothly drifting dust clouds, and more.
- Optimizing our simulation performance with Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS).
- Doubling down on our efforts to bring Universe Sandbox to phones and tablets (iOS & Android).
- Begin adding basic plant-based life simulation.
- Continue improving our development tools to find and fix issues quickly.
We plan to work on all of these projects in 2024, but some, like our new graphics renderer, have been in the works for a while. Additional challenges may arise that delay features, and our priorities may change.
New Graphics: A Visual Glow-Up
Work in Progress: Earth and 100 colliding moons after some of our graphics renderer changes.
It’s time for a glow-up, literally. We’re rebuilding our graphics rendering from the ground up. After our overhaul, only the hot parts of the objects will glow instead of the entire object, dust clouds will blend smoothly with other objects, and more.
- New Graphics Renderer[list]
- Last year, we started transitioning our graphics rendering to Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This system allows us to use more true-to-life light properties and easily add and maintain new graphical elements. We’re expecting a performance boost too. [list]
- Dust clouds passing through planets currently show sharp lines at their intersection. URP will let us render transparent clouds that blend smoothly with planets, called soft particles.
Current: Dust clouds passing through a planet show sharp lines where they intersect. Our graphics overhaul hopes to remove these lines.
 Current: Earth glowing at 2500 °C. |
 Work in progress: Earth glowing at 2500 °C. |
[/tr]
 Current: The Moon has lightly glowing craters after being bombarded by many small asteroids. Even though only parts of the object are hot, the entire edge glows red. |
 Work in Progress: The Moon has brightly glowing craters after being bombarded by many small asteroids. Only the hot impact areas glow. |
[/tr]
- Light – it’s not just for stars anymore. Hot planets will emit light based on their temperature so you can light up your simulation with intense impacts.
Work In Progress: Moons collide and heat up. The hot spots glow, illuminating other moons in the simulation.
[/list]
Physics: Collisions, Gravity, & Performance (Oh My)
Work in Progress: Small moons collide and slide across Mars’s surface, creating a long crater and spraying fragments, which create more small craters.
Improving collisions and their aftermath, like impact craters and ejecta, and continuing to optimize our physics simulation are all improvements we’re working on this year.
- Advanced Game Engine Features[list]
- We’re continuing to reconstruct our simulation architecture using the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) from Unity, the game engine we use to build Universe Sandbox. We made good progress last year and are excited about the expected performance gains.
- DOTS optimizes our simulation by efficiently running more computations simultaneously on the CPU, which means simulating more objects, collisions, and fragments at once.
- This transition will effectively combine parts of our simulation, like how different types of objects are defined, making it easier to maintain without sacrificing complexity.
- Our new friction model will simulate craters stretching out as objects skid across each other's surfaces during collisions. In our current simplistic model, craters are always circular.
Current: Ceres collides with Earth, creating a circular impact and spraying fragments outwards from the direction it came.
Work in Progress: Ceres collides with Earth, sliding across its surface to create a long crater and spraying fragments that impact and crater Earth.
Work in Progress: A meteor burns up as it flies through Earth’s atmosphere.
- Rock fragments and gas clouds are created when planets collide or are vaporized, but computer limitations mean we sometimes need to remove the old ones to create new ones. We’re testing better removal methods to immerse you in the chaos. This was released in March as part of Update 34.1.
Before: 100 moons orbit Earth and collide, creating many fragments and dust clouds that are removed quickly to create new fragments from new collisions.
After: 100 moons orbit Earth and collide, creating many fragments and dust clouds that expand and fill the space while creating new fragments from new collisions. This was released in March as part of Update 34.1.
- We’re experimenting with a new method of gravity simulation to allow rock fragments and dust clouds to attract and merge, forming planets & moons. Currently, these particles can only be pulled on and cannot form planets independently.
- If the Sun gets too massive in Universe Sandbox, it instantly shrinks into a black hole. In real life, this shrinking and compression takes time. We’re updating our simulation so these transitions can occur on realistic timescales.[list]
- We hope to simulate the answer to the question, “What if you filled the Solar System with soup out to Jupiter?” (Spoiler: The soup would contract into a supermassive black hole in about 30 minutes.)
[/list]
[/list]
Universe Sandbox on Phones & Tablets
[previewyoutube=jG5vWdhBQY8;full][/previewyoutube]
Collisions and surface simulation already run smoothly in Universe Sandbox on mobile devices. This video was taken before Terraforming | Update 34. Universe Sandbox on mobile will have the same features as on desktop.
Getting Universe Sandbox on mobile devices (iOS & Android) is a major focus. We’re continuing to optimize our interface for small touch screens, and you can read about the latest mobile developments in our second Mobile DevLog.
- Small Screen Interface[list]
- Unity’s cross-platform capabilities let us easily bring the same simulation changes to mobile devices and desktops.
- Our biggest challenge with mobile development is adapting our interface to work well on small touch screens (like a phone). Development is underway to intelligently resize, hide, and reveal panels as needed so you can focus on cosmic creation instead of managing the user interface.
Work in Progress: Simulation panels are resized, hidden, and revealed as they open and close. This video was taken on a desktop with Universe Sandbox resized to the resolution of a smartphone.
- Another requirement for mobile is boosting performance across all platforms. Alongside our new graphics renderer and rebuilding our simulation architecture, we're improving interface responsiveness and resource utilization and optimizing start-up times, among other things.
- Universe Sandbox on mobile is built from the same codebase as the desktop version and will have the same features.
- There is no mobile release date yet.
- We plan on it being a one-time paid app with no ads or in-game purchases. [list]
- Price is not finalized.
[/list]
[/list]
Surface Simulation: Let There Be Life
Too much heat or gas kills vegetation. Currently, vegetation only appears where planets have a gas pressure between 0.5 to 2 bars and a temperature between -55 °C to 55 °C.
Now that we’re simulating materials like oxygen and carbon dioxide on planet surfaces, we can begin working on basic life simulation. Life will grow (and die) on these surfaces in real-time, the same way we simulate temperature, liquids, and gasses flowing.
- Basic Beginnings[list]
- Initially, we plan to simulate just plant life, with vegetation growing, spreading, and dying based on the planet's temperature, atmosphere pressure and composition, and more.
- As life develops, we’ll simulate how it affects the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, also known as a biosignature.
- Long term, we plan to add more varieties of life, like herbivores and carnivores, and simulate their interactions as a food chain develops.
- Eventually, you’ll be able to cause catastrophic events leading to mass extinctions and customize life conditions, like the amount of oxygen required for life to develop.
- Life will spread across planets' surfaces after being Planetscaped onto a planet or appearing spontaneously. It will even spread to other planets on fragments from collisions.
[/list]
Upgrading Our Developer Toolkit
An automated test showing Neptune disrupting Saturn’s rings. At the end of this test, Universe Sandbox takes a screenshot.
We’ve also been improving the tools we use to create and test Universe Sandbox for faster updates and bug fixing.
- Parallel Sandbox Construction[list]
- Our newest automatic build system, which creates a new version of Universe Sandbox in the cloud whenever one of our team members changes the code, can make up to 10 versions at once. [list]
- When many of us are making changes, this automation lets us test any new version within 30 minutes.
Partial GitHub Actions flow chart of our new system to build new versions of Universe Sandbox. Each step records what it’s doing, how long it took, and if it’s complete.
- Expanding our automated test suite, which covers collision physics, simulation performance, and more, helps us catch and fix bugs faster.[list]
- We’re exploring programmatic ways to compare test results to accelerate issue identification.
Earth and many moons collide. Our automated capture system took this screenshot, which was recently added to our Steam store page.
[/list]
[/list]
Updating Our Minimum Requirements
To adopt the latest technologies needed to restructure our simulation architecture and use our new graphics renderer, we plan to update our minimum requirements this year to include
- 4 GB dedicated video memory (up from 2 GB). 8 GB will be recommended.
- Apple: Silicon CPU (M1 or newer), meaning that Intel Mac will no longer be supported.
- Windows: Direct X version 12
While it is never fun to have support dropped, these new technologies will allow us to improve performance and add new features to Universe Sandbox now and well into the future.
We’ll ensure all users affected by this change can always access the version of Universe Sandbox from before this minimum requirements update.
And Beyond
Work in Progress: Earth rotates so quickly that it starts to flatten out. This flattening is purely visual for development purposes and does not affect collisions or the heating effects from the stretching.
Our future goals include realistically colliding everyday objects, like a watermelon and a sledgehammer, adding detailed planet surfaces, and properly simulating comet tails. These are in early development, and we don’t know when they will be released.
- Stretch it Out[list]
- Most objects in Universe Sandbox are spheres, but in real life, some rotate so quickly that they stretch and flatten, like the dwarf planet Haumea. We’re working to simulate that stretching.
- Currently, when objects collide, they’re treated as spheres. We’re working on adding new physics so that everyday objects, including simple shapes like dice and complex shapes like spacecraft, will collide according to their unique forms. This is often known as rigid body collision physics.
- Imagine flying over mountains and through canyons on planet surfaces in Universe Sandbox. We’re still experimenting with ways to add more details to planet surfaces, but we’re excited about the possibilities.
- To simulate comet tails streaking through space, we plan to overhaul our volatile system, which determines how gas escapes from a planet’s atmosphere into space.
[/list]
We’re excited to bring so much to Universe Sandbox this year, and we can’t wait to share it with you!
