Hey guys, just joined. I've recently been really intrigued about the process of creating video games and everything that goes into it. I really have no understanding of any of it... coding wise and all that. But I get the basic concept of it. I don't have much time so I'm just going to get right to my theory or question, and see if I can get answers or spark a discussion.
Why don't programmers program "laws" into a game engine or whatever. Say these laws could be physics, lighting, how matter reacts to other matter with a different mass or same doesn't matter. I know they have physics engines, but why are physics engines convincingly fake when we have all the equations and the real physics data that we could input to create a real-life physics engine? Then once all the foundational "laws" are programmed and set in space, you sort of create the "Big Bang" within the game and let matter react to what the laws state can and can't happen.
A game that kind of showcases what I'm thinking is No Man's Sky. It's all procedurally created. So you don't manually have to program everything into the game, the computer auto-generates it based on laws of the world that have been created I'm assuming. This would save so much power and space on the CPU/GPU (Am i right on this?) and be extremely efficient because there are less objects/sequences that have been manually added that takes up space
I'm thinking if you could create games like how the Universe was created in essence. The Universe, say, has laws set up that every atom of matter reacts to within the limits of these laws. The laws tell the matter that develops within the space what it can and can't do. These laws can be the law of relativity, gravity, etc. etc. We have the math behind the forces of gravity, we can predict what gravity will do to an object with any amount of mass. Why can't we incorporate these predictions into a game/world using mathematical equations/algorithms? With these laws set, we could then go into an engine, let's say, and all you would do to add objects into the environment is choose or create the object then insert values for it's mass, weight, color, density, etc.. whatever values that need to be input so that the pre-programmed laws of the world can read and identify the object and can now react to the said object realistically because the variable in which the pre-programmed law needed to complete the algorithm/equation is now given(Inserted values of object being added). I feel like this way of computation is extremely efficient because once laws are in place, everything else just reacts to it and you don't have to worry about manually programming reactions and interactions.
Of course you could still go in and add dialogue where wanted and NPC and the buildings but you have more room for those things because of the efficiency of the laws.
Please let me know what you guys think, if this is even close to being practical. If there's blockades within programming language that prevents this computational behavior... etc.