Development

Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in any official Universe Sandbox releases. But they are now available in the experimental version of Universe Sandbox! Continue reading to learn more about how to try this version.

If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the previous Surface Grids DevLogs #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, and #10. Keep in mind these DevLogs document a work-in-progress feature. Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of future versions of Surface Grids.
 

What is Surface Grids?

Surface Grids is a big, complex feature still in development. It simulates the surfaces of planets, moons, and other objects, adding much more detailed, dynamic, and accurate visuals.

How? It uses a grid of data to keep track of thousands of points across an object’s surface. Each point stores local data, like temperature, elevation, and composition, for that spot.

It also simulates how this data changes and moves from one point to the next across the surface. This allows us to simulate water levels, water and vapor flow, heat diffusion, material states, and more. These are complex phenomena that we simulate with simplified models based on geophysical and climate science.

And as a bonus, it makes it possible to add tools like lasers, which are essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.

Time to Experiment

Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in official releases of Universe Sandbox. But you can now try them out in the experimental build! This experimental build has an incomplete version of Surface Grids & Lasers. You’ll see areas of the simulation and interface that are works in progress. And you’ll see plenty of bugs. Part of trying out the experimental build now is helping us make these features better as we continue development.

To opt into the experimental build:

1. Right-click ‘Universe Sandbox’ in your Steam Library
2. Click ‘Properties’
3. Select ‘Betas’ tab
4. Set dropdown menu to ‘experimental’
5. Close Properties 
6. Once updated, launch Universe Sandbox

Check out What’s New | Experimental Builds for an overview of changes, tips, known issues, works-in-progress, and other notes.

Recommended sims:

1. Earths Around Sun x10 Tidally Locked
2. Bombardment of Moon
3. Earth & 50 Colliding Moons

Recommended experiments:

1. Laser the Earth! (Tools > Laser)
2. Throw water at a cold planet (Tools > Material)
3. Terraform a Random Rocky Planet
4. Tidally lock planets close to a star
5. Dock Temperature and Displacement maps during a collision

We shared this experimental build recently on our Discord and we’ve had great responses so far, with plenty of feedback on what’s good, what’s broken, and what could be improved. Now we’d love for you try it out and give us feedback. The best place for feedback? Discord! Just keep in mind this isn’t the final version and there’s still work to do.
 

Keep an Eye on the Data

You’re welcome to enjoy Surface Grids & Lasers however you want, but if you ask us, we think the lasers are small potatoes compared to everything else that is now happening on object surfaces.

The Surface Grids map not only looks cool, but it also provides a lot of insight into what’s going on with Surface Grids. To see all of the available options, check out the very top of the Properties panel in the new Surface tab.

You can switch to Temperature, Elevation, Displacement (Impacts), Water Level, Lapse Rate, Vapor, and Ice, and you can dock multiple maps so you can watch them all at once. The most interesting data to watch depends on what is happening in the simulation, but you’ll also find that they’re all connected — for example, a collision will affect all of these as the temperature rises and craters form, which in turn changes the elevation and may displace or add water, depending on the composition of the impacting object.

What’s Next

Video: Surface Grids data, such as temperature and water depth, shown directly on an object’s surface (work in progress).

Moving forward with these experimental builds, we’re balancing our development between addressing feedback from the community and continuing with everything we had already planned for the release of Surface Grids.

One issue that has come up for some users is performance. Surface Grids is the first big Universe Sandbox feature that relies on the graphics card (otherwise known as graphics processing unit or GPU). Previously, the heaviest calculations were from the physics side of the simulation, and these were all performed on the processor (CPU). Now with more emphasis on using the GPU, not just for visuals but for running all of the calculations involved with simulating surfaces, we’ve better balanced out the simulation calculations across a user’s hardware. But this means that users with older integrated or mobile GPUs (usually found in older laptops) may see worse performance than before. We’re doing our best to squeeze out all of the performance we can get on older hardware, but ultimately there’s a limit to what we can do, and the unfortunate reality is that we’ll likely be raising our minimum and recommended requirements soon to include more dedicated video memory.

Beyond that, our focus is on fixing any bug that comes our way and improving the new interface, all to make these features as fun and easy to use as possible. Plus there are some of the more involved projects, like implementing Brendan’s heightmap generator for random planets (see our last DevLog), visual improvements and polish, the ability to see data maps directly on object surfaces (see video directly above), and more tools for surface interaction, all of which we’ll talk about more in future posts. See you then!

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Video: a Surface Grids data map of elevation displacement as fragments from a massive collision carve and crater Earth’s surface.

Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in Universe Sandbox! This post is a behind-the-scenes look at our work on these features. We don’t have a release date yet, but we’re getting closer every week.

If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the previous Surface Grids DevLogs  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, and #9. Keep in mind these are documenting a work-in-progress feature. Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of the final release state of Surface Grids.

A primer on Surface Grids for anyone not familiar:
It’s a feature we’re developing for Universe Sandbox that makes it possible to simulate values locally across the surface of an object. In effect, it allows for more detailed and accurate surface simulation and more dynamic and interactive surface visuals. It also makes it possible to add tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.
 

How to Build a Planet

In our last DevLog we welcomed Brendan, our new graphics developer. Brendan is jumping right into helping Georg, our senior graphics developer, with work on visuals for Surface Grids. His first project is building new tools for generating heightmaps.

Our goals for this project: create a random heightmap generator capable of building known geological features in randomized configurations for planets, moons, and other objects. For example, it should be able to generate a heightmap for a planet that has features like large mountains and rifts, echoing what we’ve observed on surfaces in our Solar System, but ultimately unique in its configuration.

Additionally, it should be able to work with a combination of randomized and known data. For example, it should be able to sensibly fill in the missing gaps when we have limited data from real-life observations.

The trick with all of this is to find the balance between messy, randomized heightmaps that don’t result in any recognizable shapes or features, and clean-cut heightmaps that look overly designed and artificial.

So with these goals in mind, Brendan has come up with a recipe:

1. Generate plates
2. Generate large-scale features based on plate tectonics
3. Add details
4. Add impact craters
5. That’s a planet

Plate tectonics: Please note that this does NOT mean that we are creating a simulation of plate tectonics within Universe Sandbox. We know this is a common feature request — and we agree it would be awesome to have — but simulating and showing the actual movement of plates over time is much more complex and is something for further into the future.

Instead, our plan is to use the concepts of plates and tectonics to generate sensible starting points for large-scale features in the heightmap. Then from there, we add smaller details like lakes or hills, pepper in impact craters for older surfaces, and voila, there is the surface of a planet. (Of course, this results in just the heightmap, which informs rather than is the surface visualization.)
 

Keeping Tabs on Your System

In DevLog #4, we shared some mockups for some of the new user interface (UI) that’s part of Surface Grids. The most important part is the new data map, which shows the Grids data in a nice and colorful 2D map of the surface.

The map is a gateway to understanding the benefits that come with the Surface Grids feature: instead of seeing a single value in a textbox for a property like Temperature, there are now thousands of color-coded points all changing and moving across the surface as heat diffuses and the temperature adjusts to the factors of the simulation.

But beyond helping with understanding what Surface Grids is doing, the map is also a powerful tool for monitoring the data. And sometimes, you want to view data for multiple objects at the same time, so you can keep tabs on how the planets and moons in your system are changing in the simulation.

With the new map UI, you can “pop out” a map from an object’s Properties panel and dock it to the left side. Then you can set it to view different Surface Grids data or the standard surface or composition view, and you can stack them for different objects. Chris has been working on implementing the mockups for the map and its docking functionality, which can be seen on the left:

 
Unrelated to Surface Grids, one of our other developers, Jonathan, has been working on some styling changes to the user interface, adjusting things like font size, colors, and margins. They’re smaller changes on paper, but we think the improvements really make the whole interface look and feel better. Just part of our constant quest to make Universe Sandbox better and easier to use.
 

What’s Next

This has probably been said in a previous DevLog, but it’s worth repeating: Surface Grids is a big and complex feature. We know we’ve been working on it for a while, and it may seem like progress is slow-moving, but we really are moving along at a good pace — there’s just a lot to do. Since the last DevLog, Universe Sandbox astrophysicist and developer Jenn has fixed a handful of temperature issues, so now planets are created at, and settle into, more accurate temperatures. There are lots of little issues like this that come up when building a complex simulation of something we know so well, like Earth.

So now we’ll continue with more fixes to the simulation and the visuals, more work on the UI, more improvements to the heightmap generation, and more of everything else that helps make Grids fully functional. Hopefully we’ll have an opt-in experimental build soon. We thank all of you for your patience!

 
 
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Video: Building a gigantic, snow-capped mountain by increasing elevation

Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in Universe Sandbox! This post is a behind-the-scenes look at our work on these features. We don’t have a release date yet, but we’re getting closer.

If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the previous Surface Grids DevLogs #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, and #8. Keep in mind these are documenting a work-in-progress feature. Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of the final release state of Surface Grids.

A primer on Surface Grids for anyone not familiar:
It’s a feature we’re developing for Universe Sandbox that makes it possible to simulate values locally across the surface of an object. In effect, it allows for more detailed and accurate surface simulation and more dynamic and interactive surface visuals. It also makes it possible to add tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.

New Highs & Lows

See that archipelago in the middle of the ocean? Those are the great Hawaiian islands. We’ve been tweaking the heightmap for Earth to get all the details right, and we’re happy to welcome back Hawaii and the full coastline for Florida. There are some details to iron out still, like the large body of water that’s currently sitting in the middle of Australia.

It’s a bit difficult to get the coastlines and bodies of water correct for a planet we’re all intimately familiar with — any errors are quickly noticed by a geography whiz or anyone who lives near the area that’s incorrectly flooded or barren.

This difficulty is due to a current limitation in the elevation simulation: When we divide the full range of elevation for Earth into the limited steps we have available for storing the data, we get 83 meters per step. This means the maximum detail we can account for is 83 meters. And unfortunately, geography doesn’t often look like 83 meter ocean-side cliffs. A lot of coastline is much closer to sea level, and the smaller distinctions between land and water are lost. We have ideas for improving this, but for now, some hand-tuning of the heightmaps can get us the results we’re looking for.

Creating Continents

Another issue we’re grappling with is the state of heightmaps for randomly generated planets. Right now, adding some water to a randomly generated planet will create bodies of water and land masses as you’d expect, but the results look less like geological formations and more like noisy data.

This is something our lead graphics developer, Georg, has been wanting to work on, but his plate has been full with other aspects of Grids. …Enter Brendan, our new graphics developer! Brendan will be working with Georg on graphics for Universe Sandbox, and first on his list is the not-at-all-complicated (wink) task of creating a random heightmap generator capable of building known geological features in unique, random configurations. We’re happy to welcome Brendan to the team. Hopefully we’ll have some screenshots of his work in our next devlog.

Making Mountains

Right now something interesting happens when you hold shift while using the laser: it makes mountains. Or technically speaking, it raises the elevation. You can also decrease the elevation, too. So even if you don’t like the new and improved randomly generated heightmaps that we’re working on, you can go in and shape it yourself.

This functionality won’t remain attached to the laser, that’s just a temporary, developer-only solution until we build out the interface for this new tool. We’re pretty sure you’re gonna like it.

In the video above, we’ve divided a planet with a mountain range and then flooded one half, creating one hemisphere of ocean and another of land.

What’s Next

In addition to working on these various aspects of heightmaps and elevation, we’ve been doing a lot of work in other areas of the Grids simulation and tech, like getting visuals working on gas giants and planetoids (see above) and making the auto setting for lasers a bit smarter.

Up next is patching up all the holes we find as we continue to poke at the simulation. We also want to add a lot more visual detail to the edges of different areas like ice and molten surfaces to make it look a bit more natural. And there are plenty of other improvements and fixes to make.

We’re only kind of joking when we say it’s getting harder to pull ourselves away from playing with this feature so we can actually work on it. But in all seriousness, we continue to make good progress and we’re really liking the way it’s coming together. We can’t wait to share it. See you in our next devlog!
 
 
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GIF: Filling in the Moon’s craters with ice. 

Here’s our round eight DevLog on the development status of Surface Grids and Lasers. Thanks for everyone’s patience with this blog post. We took a little break from Surface Grids to talk about our work on Magic Leap in our last post — check it out to see planets bouncing off of walls and our new, floating user interface. And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out the previous Surface Grids DevLogs #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and #7. 

A primer on Surface Grids for anyone not familiar:
It’s a feature we’re developing for Universe Sandbox that makes it possible to simulate values locally across the surface of an object. In effect, it allows for more detailed and accurate surface simulation and more dynamic and interactive surface visuals. It also makes it possible to add tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.

Keep in mind this is a development log for a work-in-progress feature. Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of the final release state of Surface Grids. Read: Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in Universe Sandbox! To make this more clear, we’re now calling these posts DevLogs instead of Dev Updates.

Random Improvements

Everyone likes Earth and the rest of the cool, popular planets that make up our Solar System, but sometimes you want something a little different. That’s why we have the randomly generated planets. And with Surface Grids, the randomly generated planets are getting a little makeover.

We now have new textures and new elevation maps (which you can now see in the data map) that spruce these up and make them more unique. And we have further plans to improve how these are generated to widen the range of possibilities and customization.

Water Your Planet

It’s been possible for a while now to add water to planets in Universe Sandbox. But it’s never looked so good as it does with Surface Grids.

The key components to this improvement are great examples of what make Surface Grids an awesome and powerful new feature. It’s all about the localized data: First, you can see that the water spreads locally. Before Surface Grids, water would just fill in across the whole surface, regardless of where it hit. Second, you can see the direct correlation between elevation and water level. This was sort of possible pre-Surface Grids, but now there’s a data map for both of these that makes it even easier to see this in action (see screenshot below). And third, you can see the water freeze and the ice melt locally as well. That’s the nice localized temperature part of it.

Watch Your Step

Detouring from how awesome Surface Grids is, let’s look at one of its fundamental challenges. As with most simulation features in Universe Sandbox, Surface Grids has to battle against the simulation time step (the rate at which the simulation runs, for example 10 days per real-time second). We know that it would be awesome if you could just set the time step to whatever rate you wanted and it would just work, but that’s unfortunately not possible, at least not without sacrificing accuracy.

This fact is most obvious with gravity simulation in Universe Sandbox. The simulation automatically sets a limit to how fast the time step can go while still maintaining relatively accurate orbits. And if you try to set it faster than this limit, you’ll see a message that it’s not safe to do so. For Surface Grids, we’ll need to add a similar warning system, as it too has a limit for accurate results.

A good example of time step limits for Surface Grids is in the simulation of water flow. This is simulated by moving X volume of water from one cell to its neighboring cell each step. The maximum volume of water that can be moved in each step is the maximum volume contained in that cell — it can’t transfer water that it doesn’t have. So if you’re running at a time step that is already moving the maximum amount of water and you try to increase the time step further, the data starts to get a little weird.

We have some ideas for improving this, but ultimately there’s no way around time step limits. Our hope is that we can make a smooth experience by communicating where these limits are while allowing you to exceed them at the risk of accuracy loss.

What’s Next

We’re feeling really good about our progress on the Surface Grids feature. Now that we have the visuals and systems working for random planets, it’s time to turn to planetoids and gas giants. We also want to work on visualization for vapor, but that’s one of the few remaining items that still need a connection between data and graphics.

There are some more apparent issues to work through yet, too, like getting water levels to initialize properly on Earth. Then there are the new elements of the user interface (UI) that we’ve designed but have yet to add, and some questions about UI interaction that come up as we continue to play around with Surface Grids. And of course there are the inevitable giant bugs running around that have to be squashed.

All of this will definitely keep us busy, but the pile of tasks gets smaller every day as we get closer to releasing an experimental build and getting out the official update. We still can’t say when either of these will come yet — we thank you for your patience.

We’re also still working on a smaller update that will introduce some improvements and bug fixes for the new galaxies added in Update 23, plus a new introductory experience. Hopefully we’ll have this ready soon!

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GIF: Lasering away the ice on Earth.

Here’s our round seven update on the development status of Surface Grids and Lasers. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out Dev Updates #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6.

We hope you’ve been enjoying the new galaxies we added in Update 23. We still have another round of improvements and bug fixes planned for galaxies, but we’re proud of what we released and we’re shifting our excitement back to Surface Grids & Lasers.

A primer on Surface Grids for anyone not familiar:
It’s a feature we’re developing for Universe Sandbox that makes it possible to simulate values locally across the surface of an object. In effect, it allows for more detailed and accurate surface simulation and more dynamic and interactive surface visuals. It also makes it possible to add tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.

Keep in mind this is a development log for a work-in-progress feature. Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of the final release state of Surface Grids. Read: Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in Universe Sandbox!
 

Gotta See It to Believe It

In the past few weeks, our graphics developer, Georg, has been taking the visual foundation that was built into the last version of Grids and plugging it into the new model.

This includes 1) getting the basics down for the shaders handling different materials and phases, from water to snow to molten silicate 2) getting all of Earth’s vegetation in the right spots 3) adding lighting, including effects for diffusion and specular and rim lighting for solar and atmospheric effects 4) and adding normal mapping.

The normal mapping creates the effect of bumps and ridges, or in other words elevation changes for things like mountains and crater rims. For a lot of visual effects, we often start with more exaggerated settings then dial it back and tweak it until we reach a more realistic appearance. In the screenshots below, the bumps are very pronounced and make for surface features that wouldn’t be discernible when viewing from space. While it’s not realistic and we plan to tone it down for the default setting, we are considering exposing this value and letting anyone set it to however they prefer.

 
Please note that you can safely ignore the incorrect water levels right now. We’re well aware that Europe is completely flooded and we’re working on a fix (even if it may be an accurate representation of what human-caused climate change will do to Earth…).

This visual foundation now works for planets with known heightmaps, but it will eventually be applied to all procedurally generated objects. So whether you’re lasering Earth or a randomly generated rocky planet, you’ll see the nice lighting and normal mapping.

Graphics for Surface Grids are definitely still incomplete, but everything is coming together nicely. The screenshot below shows a tidally-locked, near-Sun Earth that is frozen on the far side and molten on the near side (note: it looks especially “clean” now because it doesn’t yet include additional visual noise from blurring, blending, and randomness).
 

Lasers!

We haven’t shared much about lasers yet, so let’s fix that. Before, lasers were hooked up to the data side of things, so you could see its effects in the data map, but that was about it. Now that we have the visual foundation described above and can see the effects of temperature on the planet itself, playing around with lasers just got more interesting.

We recently added a radius setting that multiplies the area of effect (the laser visual itself is not yet affected by this). So whether you want to melt the whole ice cap or you want to carve your name, you can do it.

In the case of the GIF shared at the top of the post (and maybe I’m just hungry right now), this reminds me most of decorating a cake. Especially the part at the end where I do away with careful decoration and just throw a bunch of icing (er, lasering?) on the top.

We often see debates in the Universe Sandbox community about these lasers — some say they’re unrealistic and not a good use of development time, and others will stop at nothing to get their hands on them.

To the first, naysaying side we say this: Yeah, lasers like this don’t exist (at least, not yet). But… what if they did? Universe Sandbox has always been about realistic simulation of fantastical scenarios, and we think this fits very nicely into that. As for development time, lasers are a tiny fraction of the larger work on Surface Grids. They’re essentially a nice side-effect of having a system like Grids that can simulate localized surface properties, much in the same way Grids will allow us to add basic life simulation in the future as well.

And to the laser fanatics we say this: Yeah, they’re fun. Thanks for your patience!

What’s Next

There are a few higher-level things we want to get working, like being able to locally deposit water and having vapor flow connected to axial tilt. And then there are some must-fix issues like proper water level on Earth and proper phase-handling for Venus (it shouldn’t look like it’s covered in liquid water, right?). There’s also more visual work to do with blending materials and phases and handling procedurally generated objects.

So we’re a long way from the starting gate, but we’re not quite in the final stretch yet. It may be fair to say we’re at the point that was described all the way back in the second dev update: “… often times the longest and most challenging part of development comes later, when we’re tweaking, polishing, finding and fixing bugs, and making sure all the complexities of the fully fleshed out model play nicely with each other and the rest of the simulation.”

We’re definitely interested in making experimental builds available to the community in the future, before we’re ready for a full release. We’re not ready to say when these will come yet, but we hope they’re not far away.

As always, thanks for your patience and support while we work on this next big, complex feature for Universe Sandbox!
 
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