PIXEvoLve began as an expression of my interest in geophysical fractals.  Each island in PIXEvoLve is randomly generated using Fractional Brownian Noise.  This creates a statistical fractal pattern that, to our eyes, looks like natural terrain.

Since mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot published "How Long is the Coast of Britain?" in 1967, landscapes and coasts have been favorite examples of fractals in nature.

The simulation that controls how the features of the world change and evolve is based on cellular automata, the most famous of which is Conway's Game of Life.  From simple rules, these simulations can demonstrate remarkable complexity, and can create patterns we associate with nature.

Each entity in PIXEvoLve obeys a different Life-like rule.  The custom simulation which allows the different rules to interact was written in C++ and runs in parallel to the main game thread.

For those who wish to play with even more cellular automata, I highly recommend the (unaffiliated) open source program Golly.

Unreal Engine 4.25 is not designed, out of the box, to display thousands of 3D models on the screen at once across all hardware. Even making use 3D Impostor Sprites, mobile platforms and PC desktops alike encounter limits on total number of vertices displayed at a time.  Many games avoid this problem by introducing fog or limiting camera movement to block the player's view of the entire map.  However, I wanted the player to engage with the simulation at the largest scales.  This prompted the writing of a custom parallax shader for the terrain.

At close distance, 3D meshes with traditional Levels of Detail (LODs) are seen.  The farthest LOD uses an impostor sprite to display each mesh with only 8 vertices.  At farther distances, the parallax shader displays the impostor texture directly on the surface of the terrain with no additional vertices.  While a parallax shader comes with its own GPU cost, it is still usable on low-end VR devices, and trades a fixed GPU cost per pixel for a theoretically unbounded number of far-distance meshes.

PIXEvoLve was built to support VR from inception. Though not built exclusively around VR interaction modalities, VR provides a sense of immersive presence and scale that draws in the player.  The act of shrinking down to walk among your island's structures becomes a rush, and interacting with the world with your hands happens without a thought.