The Small Step Engine

The Small Step Engine produced in conjunction with the University of Plymouth 2013. Each element of the shown program is heavily derived from the Universal Laws of Physics as we currently understand them. Note, the only APIs used were DirectX and Qt using C/C++.

As part of the main Thesis for my MRes Computer Science project, the program was designed with statistical accuracy in mind; the only preloaded textures you see are for the stars and skysphere with all others being procedurally derived from chemical spectra. The list of spectra is currently incomplete but still proves merit for future work.

Visit www.tssengine.com from April 2nd 2013 for a free copy of the current version of the program. Please note, the program DOES have bugs but with my available testing machines, it has not failed to run yet. Note, this is a Windows only release (Sorry but development time was key to getting the project complete :( ) and has been tested with Windows XP/Vista/7 32-bit and 64-bit. It does need DirectX v9.0c installed to run.

The Small Step Engine[www.tssengine.com]

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Hello darkness my old friend

20 September, 2016 - Small Step | 0 Comments

Hi all,

I realise it's been a number of years now since I originally released TSSE; almost a year ago now, I decided to reduce my working hours to two days a week to give me five in a week to pursue the ideas that I had since originally developing the solar system generator.

12 months * 5 / 7 means I'm little over 8 months into my 3 year plan to make a new generator with the idea that time can be modified to see both the birth, and death of universes, rendered in real-time using modern home hardware. This isn't designed to be a game at the end of the three years but instead released as a platform, from which I hope to get funding to continue development (also hoping to get a release out to the public then but will see closer to the time). Either way, 3 years is a hard limit I've put on myself for the project (October 2018).

As I'm working alone and have only used DX9 previously, I've got a number of limitations to my design. As such, I'm attempting to create the program using as simple building blocks as I possibly can using DX11. To maintain performance and tailor the system to my own needs, this means I'm unable to use any libraries past simple DX11 which itself, is unfortunately also new to me.

Anyway, here are a few screenshots of what I have been generating. I'm not yet ready to make this into a regular post as my time is very sporadically split between building under the hood and doing 'pretties' so times would be all over the place. I'll post again sometime in the future when I have more to share but if there is any interest, I might start doing some videos describing the trials and tribulations of solo development of the project... I've been told I should be doing social media stuff, I'm just a bit reluctant.

Enjoy!

Universe scene
http://imgur.com/FKQIWAQ
This was created a while ago; light blue or red shifts based on the direction from origin against where you are in the world and time can move both forward and backward. This screenshot shows 3,000,000 points of which you can probably see around 200,000. I did trial brute forcing 100,000,000 points but 7.5gb of VRAM and 11.5FPS is obviously not good enough for a release ;). This isn't how it'll look in the long run but as a test, it surpassed my expectations regarding performance and gives me a lot to play with. I'm certain from this you can render a universe at a proper scale and beyond.

Dark matter
http://imgur.com/nW3Gtp7
I've got a camera issue and it didn't turn out how I expected it to but at least it looks pretty for now! These lines will each determine galaxy clustering which will allow me to render many times more galaxies. I'd estimate my initial 3,000,000 galaxy count will instead jump to 3,000,000,000 once I combine effects and that's without proper clouds yet which should see this grow to a ridiculously scalable amount (many orders of magnitude greater).

Stellar nurseries
http://imgur.com/a/6Ya0A
http://imgur.com/a/Hqbve
Both my most recent, as well as by far my most complete concept. I made a psuedo volumetric cloud generator to make these nurseries which will largely be how you see them in the final release. They generate in under one hundredth of a second and render at about 900 FPS on my Ati390 (GX970 equivalent) which is part of my target spec although performance does drop to around 350 when navigating through them and generating further LOD. They also look awesome on the Oculus by the way!

Planet meshes
http://imgur.com/6luZBKa
Tricky to get the math right but these now scale to any level of complexity and provide a pixel perfect sphere mesh (such a big improvement compared to my old project). When complete, these will determine more details the closer you get.

Stars
Large star from a distance: http://imgur.com/LgYzMSc
Baby star a lot closer: http://imgur.com/8bIGThT
Baby star close up: http://imgur.com/6rL6JZe
Not complete, too many issues with display. I'll be improving performance on this significantly but it does look cool.

Other scenes for which there is little point making screnshots of:
Voxel test (think Minecraft),
Rain scene,
Navigation room experiement with custom (broken) lighting,
CPU and GPU based N-Body simulations,
Oculus UI Tests,
Basic Earth like clouds.

Mark.