Essence - Comic Engine
A journey into the creation of a corner of the universe
🌌 Building a Believable Universe
Physics, scale, and perception in Essence – Cosmic Engine
When developing a space engine, you quickly run into an uncomfortable truth:
the real universe was never meant to be viewed through a game camera.
Distances are immense, differences in scale are extreme, and physics—while fascinating—doesn’t always translate into something visually readable or engaging.
With Essence – Cosmic Engine, our goal has always been clear: to build a universe that behaves in a believable way, while still being exciting and enjoyable to explore.
In this devlog entry, we’ll talk about how we approach body simulation, performance, scale management, and the delicate balance between realism and perception.
🪐 Simulating space is harder than it looks
At a conceptual level, gravitational simulation is simple:
each body attracts the others based on mass and distance.
The real challenge appears when:
the number of bodies grows into the hundreds or thousands
masses differ by orders of magnitude
distances become so large they’re hard to even comprehend
In Essence, we’re not simulating generic objects, but stars, planets, moons, and asteroids, all evolving together in a dynamic system that must remain stable over time.
stable orbit simulation
⚙️ Physics designed to last
To avoid instability and unpredictable behavior, the simulation was built around a few core principles:
numerical stability
temporal coherence
long-term reproducibility
The physics system uses high-precision calculations and an integration method well suited for orbital mechanics, ensuring that bodies behave consistently even over long simulation times.
The result is a universe that doesn’t “blow up,” drift uncontrollably, or fall apart as time passes.
🌳 Making the problem manageable
One of the biggest challenges in N-body simulations is computational cost.
Evaluating every interaction between every body quickly becomes impractical.
Essence addresses this by using an intelligent spatial subdivision system that allows the engine to:
group distant bodies together
drastically reduce the number of interactions that need to be evaluated
focus computational detail only where it actually matters
In practice, the universe is evaluated adaptively: the closer you are, the more detail you get.
space partitioning for physics optimizations
🧠 Performance through parallelism
Smooth performance is a top priority.
That’s why the simulation was designed from the ground up to take advantage of multithreading.
The most expensive operations—such as motion integration and interaction calculations—are distributed across multiple CPU cores, allowing the engine to:
maintain stable frame times
scale gracefully as more bodies are added
avoid sudden stalls or spikes during gameplay
Multithreading isn’t an afterthought—it’s a structural choice.
simulation of thousands of objects with physics
📏 The real elephant in the room: cosmic scale
Now we come to one of the most fascinating—and problematic—aspects of space simulation: scale.
In the real universe, we have:
enormous objects like stars
tiny ones like rocky planets and asteroids
Using true physical scales is absolutely possible—and we did exactly that at first.
The result was physically accurate… and visually underwhelming.
When realism becomes invisible
Take a single example:
the average distance between Earth and the Sun is about 150 million kilometers.
That distance is more than 100 times the diameter of the Sun, which itself is over 100 times larger than Earth’s diameter.
At true scale, you’d see a massive star, a barely visible dot, and an enormous stretch of empty space in between.
Accurate? Yes.
Engaging? Not really.
🎨 Interpreting reality, not copying it
The solution wasn’t to abandon physics, but to separate simulation from presentation.
In Essence:
the physics engine continues to operate using real-world distances and sizes
the rendering engine applies a dedicated visual scale, designed to keep the universe readable and visually satisfying
This approach preserves physical relationships and consistency, while ensuring that what the player sees remains comprehensible and exciting.
Reaching this balance required extensive fine-tuning and experimentation, but the end result is something we’re truly happy with.
🎯 Visual precision and the floating origin
When dealing with cosmic distances, there’s another invisible challenge: rendering precision.
To avoid visual jitter and floating-point artifacts, Essence also employs a floating origin system.
While the simulation continues to run in a coherent global space, the rendering system dynamically shifts the world’s origin to keep the area of interest close to zero.
This allows the engine to:
preserve visual precision
support enormous travel distances
maintain a smooth and stable visual experience
Once again, the philosophy is the same:
rigor under the hood, clarity on screen.
🚀 A universe meant to be explored
By combining:
stable physical simulation
efficient interaction management
multithreading
intelligent handling of scale and precision
Essence delivers a universe that feels alive, coherent, and responsive.
We’re not trying to recreate the universe down to the last meter—we’re trying to capture its complexity, vastness, and internal logic, in a way that invites exploration.
🔭 Looking ahead
This is just one piece of Essence – Cosmic Engine.
In upcoming devlogs, we’ll dive into:
procedural generation
atmospheres and climate systems
and how simulation directly shapes gameplay
The universe of Essence isn’t a static backdrop.
It’s a living system.
And the journey has only just begun 🌌