Plasmodial Slime Growth Simulation

By Praccho Muna-McQuay, Alaina Lin, and Tanish Makadia; submitted for CSCI 1230 (Computer Graphics) final project at Brown University.

If you're interested in the math used to model the simulation's slime foraging behavior, consider visiting the project website.

• Inspired by Sebastian Lague's Coding Adventure: Ant and Slime Simulations.
• Agent behavior implemented based on Characteristics of pattern formation and evolution in approximations of physarum transport networks (Jones).
• Food behavior implemented based on Stepwise slime mould growth as a template for urban design (Kay, Hatton).

Features

1. Slime agents modeling behavior of plasmodial slime molds like physarum polycephalum.
   • support for up to four different slime species at once.
2. Foraging behavior based on an attractor-field of food sources.
   • optional depletion of food sources with slime agent interactions.
3. Brushes to paint food/slime and to erase material on the canvas.
4. Starting seed library to begin the simulation, including a "circle," "big-bang," and "starburst".
5. Rapid simulation supporting over 1-million concurrent slime agents.
   • utilization of compute shaders in Unity to accelerate simulations using parallel computations on the GPU.
6. Customizable parameters for nearly every aspect of the simulation displayed on an interactive GUI.

How to Run

1. Install Unity 2022.3.14f1.
2. Clone this repository on your machine.
3. Open the cloned root directory in Unity and double click the GUI scene in Assets/Scenes.
4. Click the 'play' button at the top of the screen. Alternatively, click "Build and Run" to execute outside the editor.

Project Structure

C# Files

In Assets/Scripts:

• In /SlimeSettings: files containing various species settings.
• SlimeSimulation.cs: main entry point running the simulation.
• SlimeSettings.cs: global settings for the simulation.
• SlimeAgent.cs: definition of a single slime agent.
• ComputeUtilities.cs: utils for creating and writing to textures.
• FoodSource.cs: definition of a single food source.

Compute Shaders

In Assets/Shaders:

• SlimeSimulation.compute: multiple entry points for slime agent logic and reading/writing from textures using the GPU.