Granular

A real-time falling-sand sandbox where simple elements interact to create complex, emergent behavior.

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🌍 About the Project

Granular is a real-time cellular material simulation inspired by classic falling-sand experiments, focused on emergent behavior, elemental interaction, and performance-oriented simulation.

The world is represented as a large 2D grid divided into chunks, where elements such as sand, water, stone, and smoke follow simple physical rules. Through their interactions, complex and organic patterns naturally emerge without scripted behavior.

Granular is built both as a technical showcase of cellular automata and data-oriented design and as a sandbox foundation for future gameplay ideas, experiments, or visual simulations.

🎮 Controls

• Left Click — Place selected element
• Right Click — Remove element
• Mouse Wheel — Adjust brush size
• 1 — Smoke
• 2 — Water
• 3 — Sand
• 4 — Stone

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🧠 Core Features

• Cellular Sandbox Simulation — Large-scale grid-based world with elemental interactions
• Element Physics — Sand piles and falls, water flows and pools, stone remains solid, smoke rises
• Chunked World Layout — World divided into chunks for cache-friendly memory access
• Unity Jobs + Burst — Highly optimized, multi-threaded simulation updates
• Deterministic Update Phases — Checkerboard-style updates to avoid race conditions
• Real-Time Editing — Add, remove, and modify elements directly with the mouse
• Procedural Initialization — Noise-based world generation for varied starting states
• GPU-Based Rendering — Compute shader–driven rendering to a RenderTexture

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🧩 OPEN SOURCE — BUILD YOUR OWN

This project is fully open-source! Explore how large-scale cellular simulations, multi-threaded updates, and GPU-based rendering are implemented, or use the project as a base to build your own falling-sand sandbox or experimental simulation.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/AlinLucianBrb/Granular