UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO SERIES
UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO SIMULATOR
UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO WINDOWS

It isn't going to make you cry, and it won't sit in the top of your most-played list in Steam for weeks. Universe Sandbox isn't going to change your life. While I appreciate that's realistic, given the lack of orchestras in the vacuum of space, it would have been nice to have some ambient music quietly twinkling away in the background.

UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO SIMULATOR

The camera is a little fiddly at times, but my biggest complaint is that the simulator doesn't come with any sound or music. It's far more fun mucking about with those than creating your own universe from scratch. After that, you're on your own in the cosmos, albeit with a stack of fansubmitted simulations to play around with. Universe Sandbox won't tell you a story, and it's not going to hold your hand beyond a brief tutorial that introduces the interface. Not every single physical process is perfectly modelled (partly because we don't yet perfectly understand every physical process), but it's accurate enough to answer important questions such as вЂњwhat's the most efficient way to hurl the Earth into the sun?вЂќ The answer, if you were wondering, is to stop it dead in its orbit.ДЄs with most games of this type, you have to be content to make your own fun. That's what elevates this above most other physics simulations: the balance maintained between ensuring that processes are accurately represented and simultaneously ensuring that the sim is accessible enough to pick up and play with. After a while, they clump together into little groups like baby planets. One scenario has baseballs, dice, golfballs and footballs orbiting a 20cm-wide bowling ball. Universe Sandbox's most impressive achievement, however, lies in illustrating how the force of gravity affects every tiny little object in all of existence.

Which, if you think about it, is a bit bleak.

UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO SERIES

A few hundred years later, the solar system was little more than a series of concentric rings of dust. Mercury was the first to smear out into a ring, followed by the remains of Venus, Earth and Mars. Or, best of all, shred the planet and leave it as a dusty space cloud.ДЄfter loading up a model of our solar system, I methodically turned every single planet to dust, and sped up time so that each second in the real world was ten days in the simulation. You can simply delete a planet, but it's far more fun to explode it into eight chunks. The options you have for destruction are nearly as diverse as the options for construction. Or accidently blowing up Jupiter and watching the debris form into a second asteroid belt. Accidentally making Earth the same size as the Sun and pinging Mercury and Venus out past Uranus, Neptune and the Kuiper belt into the interstellar medium, for example. If you get it right, their orbit carves a graceful arc across the empty darkness of space.

You put rocks in space, set various physical properties such as velocity, mass and density, then watch them whizz about while cackling with glee at your power over the universe. It's simply a physics sandbox that focuses on doing one thing right: gravity. There are no bosses, no buffs or power-ups, no levelling-up system, and no objective. Ride along with the Juno and New Horizons spacecraft, or view a total solar eclipse.Judging Universe Sandbox as a game seems a little unfair.

Make a star evolve by cranking up its age or mass, then watch a supernova unfold. Or move the Earth farther from the Sun and freeze the entire planet.

Watch sea ice grow and recede with the seasons because of the tilt of the Earth: change the tilt and change the seasons. Spruce it up with moons, rings, comets, or even a black hole. Real science, real physics, no supercomputer required.Д®pic, mind-blowing collisions of massive planetary bodies that leave behind molten craters. N-body simulation at almost any speed using Newtonian mechanics.

UNIVERSE SANDBOX 2 DEMO WINDOWS

Universe Sandbox includes the desktop version and a VR mode with support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift+Touch, and Windows Mixed Reality* It merges real-time gravity, climate, collision, and material interactions to reveal the beauty of our universe and the fragility of our planet. Universe Sandbox is a physics-based space simulator that allows you to create, destroy, and interact on an unimaginable scale.

Universe sandbox 2 demo