Design and Implementation of a Coral Reef Simulation with Focus on Scientific Value and Usability

This Thesis re-implements a scientific Coral Reef Simulation, called Siccom, for the VR Coral Reef, with the goal of better performance and integration, as well as making future improvements easier.

Description

The VR Coral Reef Software, developed by various student projects at the CGVR Bremen, uses a scientific simulation called Siccom. Siccom simulates the spatial interaction between Corals and Algae in Coral Reef Communities. It was written in Java, by Andreas Kubicek. However the original Siccom was never designed to be used in such a project, this in conjunction with the VR Coral Reef being implemented in the Unreal Engine 4, using C++, caused various problems. These problems created performance and memory issues, limiting the maximum reef size. In addition the different languages and structures made it very hard to fix these issues. This thesis addresses these issues by re-implementing Siccom as Siccom++ directly in C++, making a direct implementation in to the VR Coral Reef possible. To address the issues, Siccom++ uses a general re-structuring and basics of Domain Driven Design (DDD) for better memory usage and easier future extensions. For runtime performance Siccom++ uses multi-threading and a grid structure to reduce comparisons between objects.

Results

The results show a clear improvement, with an exception for the runtime of small scale reefs, where the administration of the grid structure outweighs its benefits. This however could probably solved in a future project, implementing a tree based grid structure. Also the memory improvements are even greater for small scale reefs. All in all the results are very satisfying and Siccom++ now uses the same Architecture style as the VR Coral Reef, making further adjustments and adding new features quite a bit easier. A few of the results can be seen below, missing plot points for the Java implementation are a result from missing tests due to unfeasible resource requirements.