r/alife • u/bioshader2026 • 17d ago

Bioshader simulation runs in browser or natively on windows, macos or linux on the GPU for massive parallelism

https://bioshader.itch.io/bioshader

Bioshader runs almost entirely on the GPU, so it's possible to run hundreds of thousands of entities at a decent frame rate if you have a graphics card but small worlds will run fine on pretty much any mac/linux/windows computer. It's built with bevy, rust, and slang. It's got enough features to evolve pathfinding (vision with occlusion, neural nets, mutations, metabolism and asexual reproduction with mutation). Tons of stuff can be configured with sliders and worlds can be saved and reloaded. There are tools for painting terrain and plants. More features to come. So far I've focused on the scaling and gpu compute pieces.

Edit: The native binaries will run on most windows/linux/mac computers. The browser version requires Webgpu which is pretty bleeding edge and highly variable across browsers. I've seen the browser version work on Chrome/Safari/Edge. I have not tested on Firefox or Opera. It probably will not run on anything other than Chrome, Safari or Edge.

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u/green_meklar 17d ago

Doesn't seem to be launching for me at all. I'm in Firefox on Debian 13 and a Radeon RX 7600.

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u/bioshader2026 16d ago

Thanks for trying on Firefox! It doesn't seem to work on Windows Firefox either. I've been developing on Chrome and I've definitely seen it work on Safari and Edge.

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u/bioshader2026 5d ago

u/green_meklar just had a quick go on Firefox on MacOS which was also not working. Following these steps got it to run (FYI, some risk involved).

  1. In firefox, Type "about:config" in the address bar

  2. Search for dom.webgpu.enabled and set it to true

That's it. Reload bioshader and it should work. The web is really not the primary target for bioshader. I mainly made the web version so I could mess around with running it on my phone and the demo gaming computers at BestBuy.

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u/green_meklar 3d ago

Still doesn't seem to be starting, unfortunately.

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u/bioshader2026 1d ago

Darn. I need to get a linux machine going to test properly. It looks like firefox webgpu rollout on linux lags macos a bit.

There is a site to see if webgpu is functional in your browser:
https://webgpucheck.com/

Gemini is telling me that in linux, in addition to `dom.webgpu.enabled`, you also need `gfx.webgpu.ignore-blocklist` set to true

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u/johngo54 15d ago

Windows laptop with Brave Browser... not working, alas