Part 1 on HackerNews

I’m a big fan of History of the World, Part I.

It might not be Mel Brooks at his finest, but its transgressive historical humor has always struck a chord with me. Part of the gag is that it teases a ridiculous “Part 2” at the end which will clearly never come,* just as Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was never finished.

In 2022, between jobs, I wrote a blog post called Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1. I fully intended to write a Part 2 in a year or so, demonstrating the progress on my Unity-based SimEarth successor. I was far too optimistic.

Part of the problem was that I came to really enjoy startup life. Part of the problem was that I could never get Unity to do what I wanted with compute and render pipelines.

So, when I woke up one brisk November morning to find my blog on the front page of HackerNews, I was not just amazed to find my work celebrated but frustrated that my progress in four years was so… invisible. Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 began to feel like History of the World, Part 1.

The good news is that over the past few years, I’ve picked up a new set of technologies- particularly, React and WebGPU. I’m looking forward to writing a few tech blogs on my unique stack as I believe it presents a much better model for heavy simulation games than engines like Clausewitz.

Welcome to Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 2.

* Hulu then ruined the joke by producing a crummy History of the World, Part II which I will never forgive for making West Virginia a Confederate, comically racist state- like, West Virginia only exists because they seceded from the Confederacy! That’s like their whole thing!