All right so having been a dev for a good minute or two
I thought I'd make a tutorial to help you guys create the most basic simulation, which is of course known as "Hello Universe".
This program obviously isn't too complex
But it's got everything you need to be able to integrate yourself and play from the planet earth as the human player type.
Okay, so I'm gonna be using
Google's online development simulator for most of the project because it has a user interface and Google pretty much owns me.
But feel free to use your simulator of choice.
Okay, so go to new file, and we'll name it "Hello Universe" and it'll ask us for the game speed.
It's just how quickly players experience the passage of time in your simulation. I'm gonna base this on the speed of light
It doesn't really matter what you choose
I just usually prefer to code in C.
So the first thing we have to do is import all our planets, stars,
galaxies, and all the characters. So make sure you've downloaded the asset library.
Most of the universe is going to be empty, so storage won't be a problem.
It's why we call it space.
So most things in the universe are procedurally generated by the computer over millions of years
But when someone integrates into your simulation you have to designate who they're gonna play as.
Some devs like to make the playable characters in their own image
But if you saw what most developers look like, you'd know how bad an idea that is
So I like to design a joke character the players might like but nature would of course never allow.
Yeah, just- just import that.
Now, when you do more complex simulations, you can enable life for as many planets as you want
But for Hello Universe, Earth is the only planet with life on it.
The players will probably never find out, so don't worry about that.
There are also some other settings you can change for Earth individually.
Uhh... Number of players for Hello Universe, the only real player is you.
All the other players are simulated.
Difficulty: this is just how hard it is for you to get through the day.
Yeah
Okay, now keep in mind that simulations tend to run pretty processor-heavy.
You might have heard the programming quip:
"You need more than one thread to make the fabric of space and time"
Like most niche interest jokes I don't find it funny, but I at least understand it.
Simulations use fewer resources the longer they go on for but if you have a lot of them running simultaneously
you can free up some resources by deleting some of the older players.
Okay, so next are the universe settings and we have map size.
That's how big you want the observable simulation to be when players go in.
The bigger you make this the harder it will be for them to find your mistakes.
[typing noises]
Number of perceivable dimensions, just leave this at four
Not much point doing tutorial on five dimensional simulations because you'd already know what that looks like.
And bit rate: 300,000 kilometers a second.
Okay, so that's the primary programming done, so go ahead and compile that
Alright, no errors...
That's unusual
and all right. We're good to launch but before we do
it's critical that you scrub through the timeline check for bugs before publishing.
A lot of new devs have a hard time telling the difference between a bug and poor designs
So I thought I'd go through a few of the most frequently asked questions I get.
"My stars are collapsing after billions of years." Yeah, this is a bug
and we don't have a solution so we just make them invisible and call it a feature.
"What happens if the players discover the source code?" This almost never happens
But I don't worry about it 'cause most of my code is almost completely unintelligible anyway.
"What happens when the simulation is over?" You get a screen to choose your payment method and you can see the high scores.
Okay, so let's get back to our program. Go ahead and hit run, and...
It's as easy as that just remember you can't patch the simulation once it started, so no interaction is possible from outside the program
But you can always integrate yourself and go through as a player.
Keep in mind that millions of years of game time are processed in just a few seconds.
So if you choose a later point in time to integrate yourself,
you can actually build another simulation
inside that simulation, and another sim inside that one, and so on, and so on. I think that's called inscription.
Or encryption or recursion, or might just be a nested loop. It's not really my field.
Anyway, that's more than you worry about right now.
So, congratulations on creating the Hello Universe simulation. Give yourself a pat on the back and feel free to take a hard-earned day of rest.
So, today's video is sponsored by Audible.
And I was gonna suggest using this free book credit at audible.com/explained
for something a bit more on topic.
But I actually just saw the movie IT and I've been really wanting to read the book until I realized the 'You'll float too' tagline.
It's because the books the size of an aircraft carrier.
So, I went on audible.com/explained, signed up for my own 30 day free trial,
because [mumble] I've never used audible before...
and got 45 hours of book for free
that I don't have to carry around.
So, now I can mathematically survive up to two day road trips,
and I can walk anywhere or ride the bus without having to talk to someone,
but someone is still talking to me.
So again, if you'd like to take advantage of that you can sign up for a free 30-day trial and a free book at audible.com/explained
where you can follow the link in the description
[outro music]