Overview / Usage

The current iteration of Planet Sculptor is an early tech demo of the planet terraforming simulation game I've always wanted to play, inspired by games like SimEarth, Spore, From Dust, and Black & White 2.

The techniques used in Planet Sculptor have recently become more feasible to implement in realtime and faster to iterate on due to the widespread adoption of GPGPU techniques making it easy for a developer to experiment with high performance simulations which would normally not run at interactive rates on the CPU without multiple time consuming optimization passes. Planet Sculptor represents one sample of the kind of interactive media I'm excited about prototyping and exploring as GPUs continue to develop.

Methodology / Approach

As a game jam submission (PROCJAM 2020), it was critical that the build be available to a wide, multi-platform audience with as little friction as possible. To that end, I resolved to make the first tech demo playable in the browser with no installation required. Publishing a WebGL build imposed a number of technical restrictions on the project, most prominently the inability to take advantage of CPU multithreading or GPU compute shaders. To work around these limitations, the water surface fluid simulation was implemented as a series of fragment shaders that operate on a Texture2DArray with 6 256x256 RGBA SFloat textures which emulate the functionality of a single seamless Cubemap texture.

Technologies Used

Unity (Built-in Render Pipeline, WebGL export module)

Other links

• Published build (playable in-browser, no download)