Introduction

Graviton - The Great Sand Simulator is an experimental cellular automata simulator on the GPU with physics and programmable materials.

While it looks like a game, it is not a game. Think of it more as an art creation app, or a relaxing sandbox. Personally, I use it for art and play.

With it, you can:

• Relax by just drawing various materials and see them interact and move
• Create your own sand materials, solids, liquids, fire, acid, or other more artsy kinds, and Draw them
• Interact with gravity and forces that affect the sand
• Turn images into sand
• Fetch random images as sand
• Modify colors, physics and reaction parameters of your custom sand
• Record gifs, images and saved projects to share with others

Get Graviton from Steam

Overview

In Graviton, every material is sand. And every sand lives inside a canvas of size 1920x1080. Think of each sand being a pixel inside the image. Pixels that are then swapped around. Sand has the following parameters:

• Color (R, G, B)
• Velocity
• Id

Based on the velocity of sand, we calculate the destination and determine where sand needs to move. Velocity is updated by physics calculations, which also take pressure and density into consideration.

Sand behavior steps:

1. Update velocity by physics
2. Check where sand wants to move (destination)
3. If sand can move to destination, move it there, if not, apply alternate movement rules. For example, if sand material wants to move to the destination, and it cannot, it is moved diagonally.
4. Move sand to destination.
5. Last, apply Reaction Rules
6. Color canvas based on sand color

Within each of these steps, there are more specific settings that you can edit.

More about that in Edit Sand