Ecosystem Simulator - Optimising Performance

The goal of this end of degree project is to develop an ecosystem simulator that can be used to learn about how ecosystems work in an easy, visual and fun way. Studying any discipline is tough, therefore this project aims to make this learning journey more easy-going and fun. The ecosystem used in this project includes an environment with different biomes, trees, animals and food, all of which influence each other. Most similar projects use either dozens/hundreds of concurrent entities or thousands of simple entities. This project also aims to bring simulators to the next level by running them with thousands of not-simple entities at the same time with an agent-based system while keeping a decent framerate. This project tries to make a balance between a great amount of entities and an interesting entity behaviour. Due to the fact that such a simulator can take years and multiple people to develop, this specific project is a prototype that aims to show the great potential that this project has. This simulator is done with Unity Technologies, Blender and C#. On one hand, Blender has been used to build a 1x1 kilometers 3D island that is being used in the simulation. Unity and C# are used to put everything together and program all the systems and AIs. For this project, the used methodology is agile and feature-driven development, where short iterations are made. On each iteration, a new feature is added and in the case that a bug was found during the previous iteration, it is fixed during the current one.