Celestial Bodies

Description

In 2022, T-Head released the TH1520 a SoC with a quad-core RISC-V and a BXM-4-64 GPU Core and in 2023 Beagleboard released their BeagleV-Ahead using that chip. When I was working at imagination we wanted to have a demo running on that RISC-V platform and I was tasked to find something we could made specifically for that purpose.

It was at that time that Godot 4.0 was announced and released with Vulkan support, and unlike other game engine like Unity, Godot do have preliminary support for RISC-V.

I started to learn the game engine and playing around finding ideas from different sources including youtube, and found about Sebastian Lague channel and started to play around planetoids procedural generation and atmosphere settings. After a while I came with an idea for a demo involving different planets with fleet of ship roaming around gathering resources into a bigger cargo ship, and started to work with one of my colleague responsible for 3D modeling.

He started to make some blueprints:

Then work on the main ship:

Because of the closure of the demo team at the time, I was unable to complete the demo as it was originally planned and had to cut most of the ideas that was going to get in the demo, leaving only the procedural planetoid with atmosphere being ready and part of the demo.

Screenshot of the demo:

If you ever encounter that demo in the wild, there is a magic shortcut that show an about box:

With an option to have something orbiting the planet…

Video

Note

The video is a render made through Godot from the original source and the FPS is not representative of the actual run on the device.

References

• Beagle-V AHEAD: beagleboard website
• Sebastian Lague work: “Coding Adventure: Procedural Moons and Planets” on youtube and “Coding Adventure: Atmosphere” on youtube
• The GPU: BMX-4-64 webpage
• Godot engine: godot’s website