What is this? A project for ANTS?
Yup!
Symbiants is a slow-moving, real-time simulation of an ant colony. It's a homage to SimAnt, Tamagotchi, Progress Quest, and RimWorld. It's also mental health software.
Wait, what? Mental health software?
Yeah! You heard me. You know how keeping a dog for a pet encourages you to go for daily walks? Yeah, it's like that, but for your brain... and with ants.
Anyway.
Symbiants is written in Rust using the amazing Bevy game engine. Its build target is WASM and runs in the browser. Desktop has first-class support, but mobile is a little rougher. iOS Safari/Chrome is supported. Android Firefox works, but Android Chrome is broken due to a downstream bug. This should be resolved in Bevy v0.13 (Q1 '24)
The project is in its infancy, but has lofty aspirations. Ultimately, there are two goals:
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Create a compelling ant simulation in which the user acts as a nurturing caretaker. The colony grows over the course of real-world months and slowly takes over a planet. The colony will grow from a single queen to a full-fledged colony with thousands of worker ants digging tunnels, harvesting food, laying pheromone trails, etc.
-
Create tactful mental health software that encourages users to spend a minute meditating and journaling each day. The user will need to engage with these tasks to gain access to the sustenance their ants need. They must take care of themselves if they want to take care of their ants.
There's a whole bunch of futuristic sci-fi lore to support these ideas. The ants are on an alien world, the user is in a satellite orbiting the planet, and the two establish a symbiotic relationship, out of necessity, as a means of terraforming the planet. You can read more about that here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nxbGOTZdUY6jJPsY_xA6I/ but, fair warning, the story got quite far ahead of the code and so there's a bit of a gap between the two. All efforts are currently focused on creating a very crude, ugly, and direct MVP without supporting story or deep gameplay mechanics.
This project expects to be developed within a VSCode devcontainer (Docker). If you have that then you're good to go, otherwise you'll need to ensure your environment is configured with Rust Nightly. You can just mirror the bits declared in Dockerfile.
The primary compilation target is WASM. This will build an artifact which is ran by your host machine's browser. This is simple, but breakpoint debugging and multithreading are not yet supported in WASM. The secondary compilation target is native Linux. If this is done from within the Docker container then the application window needs to be piped to the host machine. By default, this application is configured to support x11 not Wayland and provides hardware acceleration for Nvidia/DirectX (Windows) host machine environments.
Strongly consider using Ubuntu 22. There have been reports of GPU acceleration not working out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 20.
Once your environment is ready, you may run trunk serve to spin up a local server and navigate to localhost to access the application. Alternatively, to generate a native build, run cargo watch -x 'run --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'
If you have any questions - please feel comfortable reaching out on Discord.
