burst

I was curious to see if I could implement belts like in Satisfactory or Factorio with DOTS in a performant manner. In the end, my implementation is highly parallel and works at 60fps for a million items, but let’s start with a deep dive into how both games do it.

We’ll start by generating the random points we’ll triangulate later and benchmark that, but first, we need a bit of boilerplate :

• a Monobehaviour holding the generation parameters
• a matching inspector to add a few debug facilities
• a DrawGizmos function to visualize the generated points

I always loved procedural generation, and was really impressed by mewo2’s fantasy maps. I decided to give it a try using Unity and the Burst Compiler, an amazing piece of tech developed at Unity. It was also the opportunity to dig into SVG and implement a few algorithms and white papers: Delaunay’s triangulation, a depression filling algorithm, a cartographic labeling algorithm based on simulated annealing, water network computation and a few others. I’ll write a (probably long) series of articles detailing the interesting parts and algorithms of the project and my general process to approach this kind of topic.