Nothing new but I'd like to ask your opinions

[TheFinnishForehead]

NOTICE: Before proceeding, be advised, this has been through many times on forums. But, read this regardless. Especially the Developer team. I provide more insight into the issue that should be on priority list and provide practical examples to support my claims. I by no means mean any disrespect towards rules or others, but I feel like this is the only way to get the attention this issue deserves. My apologies.

Yo. I'm assuming Update 21 will be released around June-July? That comes with a lot of interesting features that will surely keep us all busy. I've been waiting for the improved stellar model for ages now. It kinda sucks that as of now, when a star attempts to leave the Main Sequence, it instantly just blows up. This can be prevented by turning off the radius by composition but other issues arise. So that will surely be something to wait for, as is the planet grid model. I'm doing a lot of experimentation with creation of stars and different kind of binary systems. One I adjusted so at certain point in time you can see two suns rise from the horizon in an angle, looked cool, especially since one is a red dwarf. But I digress. One thing I like to do is study the effects of tidal heating and forces, and watch how an accretion disk forms. That is cool and all, but the amount of particles makes a huge problem. Serial processing used by modern CPUs isn't even close to being ideal for that job. That is why I'd like to ask the Dev team, even though you are very busy with new features (I'm sure), that you include parallel processing feature as an OPTION to the game, utilizing the raw horse power of a GPU. Thousands of CUDA cores or Stream processors simulating these things is gonna be a huge thing. In fact, I'm confident enough to say that you should add this to your PRIORITY LIST. It just happens that I have a few Maxwell Titans collecting dust on my shelf. This CUDA feature would allow me to expand my simulations to a next level. Galaxy creation failed due to CPU being maxed out. FPS was around 1-5. With the horsepower of those Titans, I could pull it off.

Also, I directed these tips, while not new suggestions, with practical examples and explanations, to the Dev team, but I'd also like to ask the entire US2 community about what kind of simulations you run, and how would parallel processing aid you with those simulations. Let's show the Devs together that CUDA acceleration is an important feature. As an extra example, even Kepler GPUs would demolish CPUs in US2 workloads. And for AMD, HD4000 series+ would do the same. So this is definitely something to consider, because for people on budget, you can find old GPUs for like 20 bucks on eBay, Craigslist or Amazon and for 20 bucks u get something that runs not only US2 better, but games in general. Devs, hear us out on this and make GPU acceleration happen. Doesn't have to be on your priority list, but this would most likely increase your sales because people with potatoes could also play this without lag on simple planetary simulations. So make this happen, as soon as possible!

Sorry for huge novel about a topic that's all over the forums, but I need to get your attention and provide good enough reasons for you to start working on this. I hope I succeeded.

[Cesare]

Me too, I suspect that Update 21 will come out in the summer holidays, around June to August. I am also waiting for stellar evolution of stars, formation of accretion disks and planet grids. I also want the developers to add much more customizations with colors within the interface of Universe Sandbox 2 without the need for modding .ubox files. What I want is the ability to customize the colors of asteroids, all rocky planets like Earth and Mars, gas giants and stars. I also want to be able to customize the colors of water and atmospheres on rocky planets, change the colors of clouds as well and change the colors of trails and orbits too. All of this must be made possible in Update 21, within the settings of celestial bodies.

This year, I am planning on buying a 16 core AMD Ryzen processor running at a clock speed of at least 3GHz or 4GHz. I hope that this PC will be able to smoothly run super massive simulations containing 1000s of planets, asteroid belts and rings without crashing the computer.

Developers must do their very best in Update 21 to also improve the performance and speed of Universe Sandbox 2, so that it allow users to run much, much bigger simulations without causing the PC to run slowly. FPS is also something that must be able to run at a very high FPS level. I really want Update 21 to be a huge step up from Update 20, because Update 21 took so long to develop and is still currently in development. Update 21 must be an update that also improves the quality of graphics and removes bugs, glitches and other errors.

[unclejoeussr]

Multi-threading would be awesome!

[Cesare]

I forgot to mention that multi-threading would be a feature that is needed to speed up the simulations in Universe Sandbox 2.

[TheFinnishForehead]

Cesare, a good point. I don't think you need to worry about the multicore and multithread performance. I checked my core utilization yesterday. Right now I have an Core i7-6800k (Broadwell-E, the last non-toothpasted Intel's Extreme series CPU architecture) running at 4GHz. It has 6 cores and 12 threads. The utilization for all cores (it was evenly spread, I'm impressed) was around 55-60% from what I could tell by my eyes and for the threads, around 35-45%. That is impressive.

Now, as for your R9 1950X, 4GHz overclock should be relatively easy, just remember to get watercooling for it. As a pro tip, Ryzen plays well with B-die RAM, so you should go for 2x 16GB GSkill Trident Z RAM. ONLY GET THE ONE WITH 3200MHz CLOCK AND CACHE LATENCY (aka CL) OF 14. That's a guaranteed B-die. Only use that RAM, and only occupy 2 RAM slots. You'll get amazing performance.

Also, btw, what do you think of the idea about adding plate tectonics to US2? As an planetary option when you view the data of a planet, like "Simulate Plate Tectonics and an ON-OFF slider next to it. Also, I think Climate simulation should be available for all planets as an Option (though I recall it could be modded) with the option to determine the gas composition of the atmosphere.

[TheFinnishForehead]

Also, I just thought of a cool feature that should be added to the game. It's not something that can be done in an instant, in fact, this would probably go beyond 2020, but still. Not only would it be cool to determine the gas composition of the atmosphere as I mentioned in the previous comment, but also the phase change in planets. Formation of LN2 and LO2 when the temp frops low enough. Also, alternative chemistry and elemental composition to high precision. For example, one could choose the planet to have sulfur rich surface with seas made of liquid methane and an oxygen rich atmosphere. The temperature of that planet would be cold enough to turn methane into liquid, but not cold enough for O2 to become liquid. Now, imagine what would happen during an even moderate impact event. The oceans would catch fire, the sulfur would do the same. It would be a literal hell. The oxygen would be massively depleted, and the atmosphere would become completely cloudy, no way to see through it, with sulfuric acid, most likely nitric acid and nitrogen oxides along with sulfur oxides to go with the CO2. That would be amazing. And, this is something to consider because of the direction computers are advancing. The parallel massive calculations are more and more directed towards the GPUs, making even a simulation of this detail level a realistic possibility, especially since this feature would be implemented after 2020, and by then we'd have GPUs (though most likely limited to the top range, like GTX xx80 and higher) capable of 20+ TFLOPS

[Cesare]

The more cores you have, the better the performance will be.

I do agree that there should be an on and off button for simulating plate tectonic on rocky planets. Also, climate simulation should be available on all rocky planets including city light as well. All random spawns should have those features.

The gas composition and the phase change in planets is also something good to add to planets when simulating there stats. The age of planets should also be simulated in a way that planets looks older and older when fast-forwarding time. By having a sulfur rich surface with seas made of liquid methane and an oxygen rich atmosphere would be an amazing feature to have.

[KimJammer]

I think that plate tectonics would be a cool animation upgrade. For the gas comp, and phase change though, even in the future, I don’t  know if a lot people would have enough computing power to do it. Still sounds cool though.

[Cesare]

Yes, it is cool. Plate tectonics are important and they should be added to all rocky planets including Earth.

[TheFinnishForehead]

KimJammer, I'm pretty sure it's a certainty they will have the computational power. If the developer team so wishes, they could upgrade their engine to DX12, and enable ALL of DX12's features and then optimize these. One funny thing about DX12 is, that when properly used, it is able to harness GPU power to amazing degree. It's been proven, 100% scalability the more GPUs you add to your system. And the best part: They can be mismatched, so GTX 1080 would work together with GTX 780, or even GTX 1080 Ti would work with Radeon Vega 64. Now, this combined with oncoming advances in GPU technology, with faster bus speeds to top it off, I don't doubt for a second it wouldn't be doable. But, I agree, it's not "profitable" (well, more accurately, reasonable) to implement or even start considering this until 2020. That's when we get DDR5, next-gen CPUs from both Teams and possibly even next-gen VRAM. GDDR6 is being implemented this year, so most likely yes to that too.

[KimJammer]

I also have no doubt that GPUs will be powerful enough. I was only referring to the people that don’t have GPUs. Because, as you pointed out, CPUs alone will be much less powerful for US2.