Anyma Engine DevLog #1: Launching the Evolution Simulation Laboratory

Welcome to the first DevLog of Anyma Engine, a simulation/game engine designed to run large-scale ecosystem simulations. With 15 years of experience in developing simulation software across various fields like warehousing, physics, evolution, and ecosystems, coupled with an obsession with high-performance computing, I've developed the Anyma Engine. This project is all about scale and speed, making some crazy exciting experiments possible.

Journey So Far

Today I launched the second version. There is no evolution happening yet, but I'm very close to achieving this milestone. This week the focus was on efficiency: In the current state 126,000 agents can roam around in real time with collision detection! All even running on a single thread. When raycasting is enabled (required for seeing) it slows down a bit to around 20,000 agents, but I anticipate that this number will go up when work is distributed across multiple cores.

Currently agents follow their own color and move away from another color, so not much intelligence yet. You can download the latest version to play with the scale of the world.

Here is what I did last week:

• Divide the world into chunks, this decreases the amount of agents I have to check against each other for collisions and raycasting.
• Write a custom standard library that is simpler and more performant than the c++ standard library.
• Optimize rendering to handle huge scales.

Short term roadmap

• Predator-Prey Dynamics: A revisit to test the engine's limits.
• Super simple neural networks and genes To test evolution.
• Custom Physics Engine: For more realistic simulations. Also see my other simulation Alife Creatures.
• Evolving Agent Bodies: Again just like my first simulation.
• Behavior Trees: To explore controlled evolution in designing ecosystems. Behavior trees are a kind of explainable Ai instead of neural networks which are black boxes.
• Parallelism!!! A job system for executing processes in the background efficiently.

Join the Journey

This is just the beginning, I have some wild ideas. Follow this page for updates, share your thoughts, and join me in creating life.

Please give suggestions for features, tech, or other wild ideas. Source code can also be found here below.

Download Anyma Engine | Source Code

Follow my progress: Twitter @TTrussner | trussner.com