CB-Developer Showcase
The Premise:
Smart Hear is a heart simulation developed as my final year project at university, with the goal being to develop a methodology of using game development tool for creating scientific simulations. The heart simulation was chosen to help showcase how.
Structural Overview:
Within the application, there is a parental Heart organ containing several groups of cells within which the user can change perspective as they wish. Each cell and organ responds to a potential stimulus which can be activated, affecting all objects as set. For this demonstration I added a small blockage of an artery which creates heart attack symptoms.
The project's structured in a dynamic manner, each organ, cell and stimulus created from a template that's highly customisable and quick to create without any additional programming.
Because of this uniform design and customisability, the application can easily be used for various types of simulations, not just cells and organs. Instead cells could be treated as particles in a system, or houses in a city, it's not constrained to the specifics on the demonstration and the stimulus can contain any type of alteration to these objects.
Image of Cell View
Design and Construction:
A large focus of the project was the need for efficiency, to allow the application to be expandable without extra cost to the end user. By leveraging Unity's systems, the application is designed to cope with large scale simulations by consistently managing loaded and unloaded data. Object pooling is used to fix the cell count, regardless of how many are within the system.
Along with this, I used scriptable objects and data referencing to reduce the amount of information these objects store. Within an organ, each cell stores their position, a string reference to their cell type and information on changes made to that cell.
Simplified Class Structure Diagram
With this swap out system, a cell object is used to represent any cell in the scene of its corresponding type, then any changes are temporarily applied for visual purposes. Regardless of cell count, there's only 1 copy of data for each cell, organ, stimulus and stimulus response.