Development

Indie Creator Program

The news is out, we got a grant to develop Universe Sandbox for Magic Leap! Out of the 6,500 applicants that applied for Magic Leap’s Independent Creator Program, we were one of the lucky 30 that were accepted. We’re excited to join the company of other great indie developers and excited to bring the Universe Sandbox experience to Magic Leap.

If you’re not familiar, Magic Leap creates mixed-reality (MR) technology. Like VR, MR utilizes a headset and a motion-tracked controller for interaction. But unlike VR, the real world doesn’t disappear when you put on the Magic Leap headset. MR creates a map of the physical world around you and then superimposes digital images over it, bringing objects to life by making them appear like they are right there in front of you.

And with the mapping and object detection, the real world can interact with the digital world, allowing you to do things like smash planets against your wall.

Bootcamp

The very first step of development. Viewing Earth in Universe Sandbox through Magic Leap.

In February, Dan (Universe Sandbox creator & director) and Dave (Universe Sandbox mobile developer) went to California to attend the Magic Leap Creator Bootcamp. The Bootcamp was a crash-course in Magic Leap development, with discussions about the hardware, technical considerations, best design practices, and everything else creators like us need to know to make our magic happen.

It was an inspiring few days and a great opportunity for us to see what others are working on and what is possible for Universe Sandbox. We received some quality feedback on our plans as well as some exciting ideas for new directions.

Improving Universe Sandbox on Every Platform

Developing Universe Sandbox for Magic Leap is without a doubt exciting. But we don’t think about this development work as existing in a vacuum. While we continue to develop for desktop, we’re completely rewriting our VR interface, we’re polishing and optimizing for mobile, and we’ve now begun this work for Magic Leap. Further in the future, we’d like to do console versions, too. A key part of our vision for all of this is that the Universe Sandbox experience is never watered down. We want to make it possible to do the same things with Universe Sandbox in VR and on your phone that you already do on your desktop.

Of course, different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses; our design decisions are affected by these considerations for different hardware, different input, etc. But we can still aim for the power and flexibility that exists in the desktop simulation and interface.

Some of the design problems we face with Magic Leap will require developing solutions that improve all platforms. We expect the work we do on the interface will have a lot of significance for both the VR version and the mobile version that we are working on. And the performance optimizations we make while getting Universe Sandbox running on the Magic Leap headset will certainly have a ripple effect and improve performance on every other platform.

We look forward to sharing more about this journey as we continue development for Magic Leap!

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Delayed Gratification

We know many of you have been patiently waiting for two of our next big features, Surface Grids & Lasers. We believe these features will be an awesome addition to the core Universe Sandbox simulation and experience, and we know from your excitement that you agree.

Not familiar with Surface Grids? 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 possible tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface.

Short Version

If you’re a fan of treating bad news like a bandaid that needs to be ripped off, here’s the short version: We chose to further delay the release of Surface Grids & Lasers because our implementation was not meeting our expectations. We are now applying our work to a completely new approach that we think will be well worth the wait. We hope to have it ready this summer. Thank you for your patience!

And in the meantime, we hope to release some new simulation features: improved physics and new galaxies. Read more about these below.  

Long Version

And if you’re curious, here’s the longer version: Last month we sat down for a team meeting on the status of Surface Grids and Lasers and had to make a difficult decision. The features weren’t quite living up to our expectations and standards. While we were continuing to make progress on development, we were also continually running into problems and were pushing the technical limitations of the system we had implemented, all with diminishing returns. We could either continue to work through all of the issues that remained and end up with something that met most of our high-level design goals but fell short on performance, or we could take everything we had learned and reimplement it in an entirely new system that would meet even more of our goals, be exponentially faster, bypass some of the issues we were trying to solve, and have much more room for future expansion. That makes it sound like a clear choice, but there were a couple of drawbacks: there were some technical compromises with this proposed new system, and pursuing it meant that we’d have to further delay the release of these features, something that we knew both we and our fans would not prefer. But after more discussion, we decided we didn’t want to compromise the quality of these features — let’s delay a bit, work on this better version, and release something that we’re very proud of.  Please know that we are committed to new features and improvements and to the long-term future of Universe Sandbox development. We’re even expanding our team again — come join us as a Graphics Developer or Spaceship Physics Developer!

We can’t give a release date yet for Surface Grids & Lasers, but our plan moving forward is to provide an update every two weeks on their development. Below is a preview of what’s to come, showing a tidally-locked Earth close to the Sun where the back side freezes over and the near side becomes molten. And wait for the laser at the end!

Please note: the following image and the image at the top of this post are from the previous implementation of Surface Grids. We hope to go above and beyond what can be seen here for our new implementation, but the feature is subject to change and these may not be representative of its final state.

Improved Physics & New Galaxies

While we all wait as patiently as possible for Surface Grids and Lasers, we hope to deliver on two other features that have also been a long time coming: 1) a new, faster, and more stable physics system and 2) brand new galaxies.

Faster & More Stable Physics

The new physics system actually followed a similar development story as the one above about Surface Grids. After a long time spent working on the new system, the bulk of it was finished but stubborn issues stood in the way of its release, and new ones seemed to pop up every week. Eventually, we decided to cut our losses and run with a brand new system that was suddenly feasible thanks to some new Unity technology. Turns out this was a great move — we already have an experimental version of this new physics system available in Update 22.2 (learn more about trying it out). We hope to have the remaining kinks worked out soon so we can release it officially and get to work on some exciting new physics features again.

Brand New Galaxies

We also have already made great progress on a rewrite of galaxies, finally showing them the love that they have long deserved. These new galaxies will be much more varied, more interactive, and more accurate in simulation and appearance. The GIFs below do not show the latest visual changes, but they do a great job of showing how much more dynamic these galaxies are.

They will allow real-time editing of their properties, just like with any other object in the simulation:

And here you can see a series of procedurally generated galaxies added to a simulation:

We’re super proud of how galaxies have been shaping up so far. They’re impressive technically, scientifically accurate, fun to play with, and they’re looking pretty good, too. That checks all of our boxes for a quality Universe Sandbox feature. We look forward to sharing them in the future.

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The Universe Sandbox team pointing at something that was most certainly very interesting. Left to right, back to front: Jonathan Hoy, Christian Herold, Dave Nelson, Alexander Grønneløv, Georg Steinröhder, Erika Nesvold, Mat Solomon, Dan Dixon, Jules Litman-Cleper, Jenn Seiler, Jared Meier, David Rappo. Not pictured: Jacob Williams, VR Developer (see Unity’s story on Jacob for a lovely picture of him), Ryan Macoubrie, Composer

We recently had the privilege and pleasure of uniting [nearly] the whole Universe Sandbox team in person under one roof on the southern coast of Spain for an entire week.

In the seven years since Dan hired two developers to begin work on the latest version of Universe Sandbox, our team has grown to 14 strong. In the past two years alone, we have added six members to our team. So for some of us, this meetup meant seeing familiar faces, but for many, this was the very first time meeting each other in person.

While there are countless benefits to having a remote team spread across the globe, there are drawbacks as well — not the least of which is the limited opportunity to experience each other not just as coworkers, but as fellow humans with families, wide-reaching interests and hobbies, and large catalogues of cheesy jokes. This was a chance for us to have conversations that weren’t at all related to code architecture, simulation performance, pesky bugs, or features on our roadmap. Though of course, we couldn’t help ourselves from having those conversations, too.

And importantly, we set aside time to take a step back from the details and appreciate this massively ambitious and unique project we are all a part of and discuss the future that it holds. Believe us when we say our wishlist for the future of Universe Sandbox is not brief.

We’ve now returned to our homes in Germany, Denmark, Australia, and across the United States in Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Chicago, Birmingham, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, reinvigorated and excited to get back to making Universe Sandbox bigger and better.

We continue to be ever grateful for all of the support we receive from our loving community that makes all of this possible.

Scroll on for proof that we all get along and had a great time hiking, touring historical sites, and of course, eating:

 
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