So I was wondering what could tax Spatial OS, or what kind of tech demos would I want to see running so we can see the real world capabilities of Spatial OS.
Improbable kept referencing old games because as memory space increased, 2D games got more complicated, but CPU and GPU processing didn't really keep pace. Games eventually stopped being simulations because it was too taxing on computers. Gamers apparently don't care that games are static.
You had 2D games that seem to be able to run these vast numbers of entities but going 3D it's harder to have the same performance in a volume of entities.. and make them all behave. Where you could simulate space in 2D.. going 3D means all of the planets would just sit there in the 3D volume. I just couldn't accept that in No Man's Sky.. it just pissed me off.
So anyway.
Eufloria would be an interesting test case in a small 3D volume because it starts to chug when the 2D map gets highly populated with seedlings.
Just porting the game to spatial would be fine but after a while you end up with No Man's Sky's stupid 18 quintillion planets. Sure each planet can be compelling but they don't do anything. Hello Games designed it to be the typical static balls covered in static 'plant' things and alien creatures that run around doing nothing.
I mean you'll never visit them all. It isn't practical to have that many 'planets'. Something like was everything static BECAUSE they went with a nonsensically massive scale as a sales bullet point.. and couldn't make those systems dynamic at planetary level? or star and local cluster level? or could they have made the game more dynamic, stars, orbits, planets, seasons and weather etc. On the local level and still be dynamic on larger scales? We'll probably never know.
Maybe it was just too ambitious and something like eufloria would behave better on the local (planetary) and larger scales (local clusters).
As it's a relatively simple game (runs on phones) porting it to 3D shouldn't even be that taxing for a computer never mind in the cloud. Consider if it had to do physics (adding gravity simulation, so stars have planets in various orbits, planets could collide, light fro the stars would light things up so for ray tracing, and actually simulating the energy that local star light would provide to trees on the planets surface, and then other energy sources like radioactive materials.. which could power other forms of life like worms, and geothermal energy sources.)
I think it would be an amazing ambient simulation without even giving the players control of anything.. just being a virtual ant farm that you could study.
And going 3D means more things, like more trees because each planet's surface goes from being a circumference to an area. And each planet goes from being an area to being a 3D volume. the leaves, branches, and roots could be food for surface/air (seedlings) and ground dwelling creatures (ants?), and worms under ground instead of just the seedlings and laser mines. The game goes from thousands of entities to... well depends on how large the space volume would be and how many planets would be inside and what spatial can handle in real time.
Could even go further by adding various materials in both the planets, stellar debris fields, and stars (if its still a game) that have to be mined out by creatures and brought to hives or something to be refined into building materials like metals? so that there's more than just trees as resources. What if the seedlings, groundlings and burrowing creatures competed or co-operated to build things like Hives. These hives would create even more complicated things like ships (the laser mines for planetary defense), or snakes for exterminating enemy worms and such and mining more effectively, instead of just having seedlings flying to other planets like in eufloria). You'd have more than enough ingredients for a typical RTS.
Swarms of ships, seedlings, worms etc would be really cool to just watch in realtime. Again, like an ant farm.
If you've read the commonwealth saga by Peter F Hamilton maybe you see eufloria (originally titled Dyson) as similar to the alien machines. Seedlings being the motiles and trees being the immotiles.
It was sad that the game doesn't have stars and seedlings that can feed on and weaponize stars. Having a game that would actually simulate it though? what it would be like for a life form to exploit the resources of planets and eventually stars? That would be amazing. But like even more if the simulation made sense based on simple rules and design like eufloria. Each planet only has so many resources, each star has only so much material it can burn. That light would power all those trees on planets which generate resources that power seedlings and other life and would eventually die.