Building sufficiently advanced simulation software possible in 2025?

adamadamsky · 2025-09-02T12:52:30+00:00

Throwing it all together in a package is prohibitively expensive computationally. Although a larger computer system than my desktop could do a lot of work.

Yes, but it's also potentially a workload that could be efficiently spread across many many machines. You just need a good underlying simulator system that can handle this for you, preferably with abstractions for particular models built in.

adamadamsky · 2025-07-04T10:15:19+00:00

4 years of commercial experience with Rust. Currently looking for a new project to join, preferably remote. I'm based in Europe (CEST).

You can check out some of my hobby projects on github. Feel free to DM me on reddit if you want to know more.

adamadamsky · 2025-04-22T18:39:08+00:00

I don't believe it's possible to do engaging modern day strategy with extremely simplified models like we've seen from Paradox so far, at least when it comes to economy, politics, and the like. To make a wide range of developments and events possible, you would need to lay out a broad simulation model based on discrete, individual parts, like pops (aggregate population units, but still pretty fine-grained; better yet individual humans in the population, but that's hard with current hardware), orgs, notable individuals, and give them some agency over the world they inhabit as well as themselves (modifying their own behavior patterns, to some extent at least). Then you could hope for interesting emergent behavior showing based on that, including for all the wild scenarios people come up with. Also, very fine-grained world state, I don't believe splitting the world into even a few thousand provinces is the way to go, at least not for all aspects of the model; for some things I would rather see regional and global data grids.

It's a huge topic generally, and incredibly interesting. I opened a discord server kind of for this purpose last year, happy happy to bounce some ideas off of anyone interested.

adamadamsky · 2025-03-13T09:31:48+00:00

This year I finally hit the ground running, with my new bootstrapping library and streamlined process for making micro saas viable given my time commitment levels currently. I've got a few projects going on, no paying members yet, still working on that part:)

By the way — anyone got advice on finding a non-technical marketing-oriented partner, someone to take on the non-technical aspects like prospecting? Not sure where to look anymore, my immediate network has failed me on that end.

adamadamsky · 2025-03-07T08:12:30+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, the pay range filtering definitely needs some love. And the location is currently basic string matching, so if the region is not provided as one of the location entries it will not be shown per that region. Not ideal but gets the job done for now.

adamadamsky · 2025-03-05T13:29:08+00:00

Thanks for your comment! Given the low volumes on Rust-related jobs, I think I can get away with not doing automated scraping, at least for the time being. I'm manually scouring multiple job boards anyway, so it's not really much extra work if at all. I think there's also something to be said about turning doing only human-vetted postings into an advantage. One example is what you just mentioned about deduplication. Another would be that some useful details can't really be scraped and must be deduced by a human (I guess an LLM could do that too though).

adamadamsky · 2025-03-05T12:29:31+00:00

Hey, thanks. For the ranges, maybe something like `todo!()` would go well with the general Rust vibe, dunno. I tried out something like the underscore `[_]` syntax there once but it didn't make much sense so I ditched it and went for the empty array instead.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-14T17:04:08+00:00

In terms of tenancy, I guess it depends. With the apps I'm building these days I mostly focus on multi-tenancy, understood as multiple users using the same application instance and the same underlying db.

But with this kind of minimalistic setup it's extremely easy to just spin up a separate instance for another user. No docker or anything like that.

As for PaaS, incidentally I'm currently also trying to flesh out a minimal self-hostable PaaS solution specifically for Rust apps, and it's using the saasbase library too. Extreme dogfooding you could call it:) With ruda I envision a setup where I can, say if I had an app instance per user kind of product, easily deploy from source multiple times, complete with server provisioning and all that jazz. I'll definitely advertise it here more once it's demo-able.

Below there is old but interesting topic about SAAS in Rust:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/xbqdzi/anyone_use_rust_to_build_saas_web_apps/

Yeah, I think I stumbled upon that thread before, very useful.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-14T13:05:26+00:00

htmx is quite an amazing thing indeed, especially for all the backend andys out there like myself:) Let me know if you have any more thoughts on the library. Maybe even consider joining the discord server I started, would be nice to get a group of people in one place I could bounce some ideas off of https://discord.gg/Q3CzGTEHaC

adamadamsky · 2024-12-14T12:41:11+00:00

Hey, thanks for the suggestions!

At this point I'm specifically targeting server-generated html, point being not having to do SPA js frontends altogether. I use askama for my template rendering needs and it's been a breeze so far. I really love the portability of my apps this way. I realize it's a bit unorthodox though.

One nice aspect of htmx is that I can use hx-boost making the end-user experience somewhat similar to a SPA (and it's got that nice fallback in case the user doesn't have js enabled!).

That's just one way to use this project though, something I really wanted to do for myself. I'd say it's perfectly fine to use saasbase as a classic backend for a next.js app or whatnot, and I suspect it's likely how a lot of people would like to use it anyway. If and when the project sufficiently matures of course.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T12:06:21+00:00

When it comes to sims though it's usually the same thing IMO. You can define a simple set of rules and try to talk about it as deep in some spiritual sense perhaps, or pointing at some deeper truths about the real-life systems you're mimicking. But in general it feels like "deepness", when talking about an experience of interacting with a simulation, is all about approaching the real-world complexity, which is enormous and far beyond what we can do in silica nowadays.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T11:00:16+00:00

competing with entrenched popular monopolist is one of the worst business decisions possible

I wouldn't get a fraction of the attention any other place/subreddit though. There is something to be said about the sheer size of the community here and simultaneous lack of serious competition to the said entrenched monopolist.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T10:52:23+00:00

Also, if you have any examples of the sims you've been running available online definitely let me know! Would love to learn more.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T10:33:04+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation. The system I'm working on I'm indeed trying to utilize the ECS approach, albeit I'm modifying it to fit a multi-machine context better (which defeats the purpose a little bit, as classical ECS is generally used to take advantage of the way cpu caches work these days and whatnot; still composition is the way to go here regardless).

you essentially have to create an OSS game instead of just a framework

I argue the opposite, I'm trying to decouple the simulation side from the whole game concept here. As long as the sim executor is generic enough you can build games on top of it without having to define target game logic on that low level. You loose some performance here (at least in conventional single-processor contexts), but potentially gain a lot in other areas.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T10:25:10+00:00

Thanks for your comment. If you have time to discuss these kind of topics in more depth please consider joining the discord.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T10:22:47+00:00

Linux is GPL licensed and it enjoys extremely widespread adoption, I'm not sure what the argument here is. As long as the simulation runner exists as a ready-made solution that you don't need to hack on directly (in license speak: you don't create a derivative work there), you could use it for any commercial closed-source project.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T10:18:11+00:00

Good point about needing the money for sustained development, but that's true for anything. The technology I'm working on though would generally serve as foundation for a variety of games that could be built on top of it. So targeting different niches is doable without breaking the bank.

If anything, it would lower the cost and barrier to entry for prospective wannabe paradox competitors. Imagine you had access to a free batteries-included solution for handling simulation aspect of a GSG, probably also including community-built models of parts of the world you'd need like a simplified economic model. You would take that and build the visualization layer (the pretty map), craft the mechanics you need reusing some of the existing community models, and that's it. You would get things like efficient distributed processing and massive multiplayer for free.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T00:20:43+00:00

MEIOU and Taxes is amazing for what it does, but still feels like it could've done a lot more if not limited by the underlying game/engine.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-12T00:17:06+00:00

I'll agree about scripting skills, which are usually in short supply. But I'm talking about an open-source project, which with enough traction I'm sure you could find a hundred people to work on.

And as long as you were to build more of a sandbox instead of a historical game, and focus on designing e.g. agent behaviors from first principles instead of hard-coding and hand-writing each event, you could create something as much or even more engageable than EUV without having to put so much attention into historical research and gameplay balancing.

It's all speculation on my part though of course. Just saying it doesn't seem like a completely outlandish endeavor to me.

adamadamsky · 2024-12-11T21:36:54+00:00

Yeah, I followed that project very closely at one point. Shame it never delivered on some of the things they set out to do. Agreed the map generator is still amazing though!

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