PreCiv - Pandemic simulator

Hello,

I want to present you PreCIV which is a pandemic simulator. Please also visit our Steam Concept page and vote for the game.

The game simulates the distribution of a virus over the whole planet and you have two modes to choose from: Destroy human being or rescue our earth.
We will publish the game on Steam and it should be playable on both PC and Mac. We develop the game with the Unity 4 engine.

Facts

  • High quality 3D globe- Hundreds of Countries and regions- Two gameplay modes- Multiplayer in considerationThere are two sides which compete against: Research and Pandemic.
    Both parties aim to destroy each other, let’s start with the pandemic gameplay.

Pandemic simulation
The game always starts with one person in a country you choose beeing infected with a virus. It’s distribution from human to human is an automatic process, but it is based on a lot of parameters which you can manipulate and skill up. Firstly, the country of the infected one will grow the number of infected persons step by step. In some time the infection will spread to bordering countries.
Types of spread:

  • Country
  • Ships- AirplanesYou need to develop the virus to be able to reach and survive in any country, here are facts for each country:
  • Economic development- Medical supply- Climate- Airports and HarboursIf you start in a warm region for example then you need to adapt your virus to cooler regions. To entrench in higher developed countries your virus needs to be more resistant for drugs and so on.
    But the game has more challenges for you, there is an enemy - the global research.
    It will try to produce an anti-virus to destroy you. But first, here are the major parameters of your virus:
  • Ability to distribute- Visibility
  • Persistency- DeadlinessThose major parameters are affected by all the little updates you put on your virus. If you for instance develop the ability to distribute by birds (avian flu) then your distribution ability rises and you increase your range and chance to infect another country.
    But if you for instance develop a symptom like cough, then you increase distribution, but also visibility and a bit of deadliness.
    Those last two values now make it more likely for your virus to be spotted by global research (if people go to doctors or simply die). Then you need to be fast.

There are then several ways to succeed.
You can produce a very insidious type of virus, changing DNA (antigenic shift) to interrupt research and increase drug resistance. Also you are very dangerous and have a high persistency, which means an already infected person might not be cured.
Another possible way would be a quiet type of play. You will try to infect as many people as possible without beeing spotted. Once you infected a lot or every peorson on the planet, you can start to be dangerous.

Global research
On the opposition there is humanity. In that gameplay mode you will select a country which you can controll since then. One part of this gameplay is similar to the pandemic type, but you have to develop an anti-virus instead. This also has to survive on any climate regions and should not be vulnerable to medical standards.
You have the ability to analyse the virus to spot it’s current parameters, symptomps and such. Based on that data you can form your strategy.

Beside of genetic development there are more possible actions, you also have political influence. You can send airplanes with the anti-virus to a specific country to prevent further infection.
Also you can force other countries to enable precaution like closing airports and harbours. So any country will have it’s own values of protection status.
But you will spot egoism. If the threat isn’t high enought, your suggestion won’t be accepted by the country, but such actions are rare.

Here are a bit of actions:

  • Close airports or harbours- Close frontier- Kill/put in quarantine types of animals- Spread protectives like masks
  • Quarantine (infected only or whole country)- Military actions on infected people

You have to deal with ethical questions here: Do you want to help everybody or do you sacrifice others to prevent further infections?
One example is the ability to put a country into full quarantine. Another way is an agressive anti-virus which can even kill the infected persons. Both actions prevent furhter infections, but for a high price.

What will you choose?

The game will be even more clear since we are able to show preview videos. Just keep updated.

Thanks for reading,
Kevin Scheitler

Early thermal data

Early simulation test (Pandemic vs. Anti-Virus)

Macrophage

Nanobot

How are you building your Earth model? With 512 by 512 square tile textures? I’ve got some killer 21,600x resolution maps from Nasa which includes accurate cloud textures in the same resolution. However specular maps are in lower resolution. Got em’ in TIFF, BMP, PNG, Jpeg if you want them.

I’m really excited to see this project finished. Very cool.

Thank you. Well I am always interested in resources. We have some 16k x 8k Textures which I edited by myself to create propper maps like specular. I love how every single river is shining :wink:
Currently we have some 4k maps on the earth (color, normal, lights), but we tested other solutions like four 4k maps, but for now we are happy with one map. On the other hand a square tiling might be more efficient, we will take anything into account for the final verison.
Also there is a cloud layer which just rotates. But I want to try something cooler.

I’ve got kind of a wacky internet connection due to having a satellite internet provider so my upload rate varies tremendously throughout the day. If you’re interested in having them I could have them uploaded within a day or so depending on whether or not the weather is kind to me. Let me know. They do require a lot of working with on occasion. Was hell to try and get them loaded in any 3D program, but if you’re working with 16k textures it shouldn’t be too big of a problem.

Very nice! It’s like Plague Inc - Revamped :smile: Very keen to see the finished edition. Make sure it’s balanced! Nothing worse than a nerfed something or rather in these types of games :stuck_out_tongue: Really love the earth model! How did you do it? (No need to go into too much detail :P)

Yea balance is frightening :slight_smile:
For the earth there isn’t so much about it. It’s just a sphere with some textures and a custom shader and some other spheres/meshes with other textures overlayed (clouds, borders, country shapes).
Then there is a volumentric effect for the atmosphere. I played a bit with those resources you also find here in the forums. But first I had trouble implementing it and I didn’t like the look and feel.
Even if mine is not physically correct, I am happy with it.

Interesting game - I look forwards to trying it. I’m a big fan of Pandemic the board game, so I can see how this could be fun.

This looks great! I’m really liking the visuals. Im not quite sure this is my type of game but i know there is a big audience for this type of thing. I’l definitely be checking it out upon release either way though. Best of luck.

pretty cool…loved the looks of it. Almost looks like plague.inc, except we can do global research. gonna keep following this.

Looks great! Nice work. If you don’t mind me asking, what kind of shader are you using for the country borders?

May not a special as you expect, it’s just one texture. While we use a custom shader which gives us controll of lit and unlit areas of earth, it would work with any type of transparent shaders like particles or cutout.

This is a really cool concept, I’ve found pandemic simulators really engaging in the past and being able to play from the other side too is a great twist. I will be keen to see how you balance it and just how much depth you go into!

How far into the medical science to you intend to go?

Your art style looks great.

This project is looking very impressive. I have always been quite intrigued by these types of simulators, you can consider one copy already purchased once it is published!

So you mean how realistic the (anti-)virus will behave? I would say we make it beliveable. We use real data like population, medical supply, development, temperature, humidity and such. All those parameters do influence the distribution of the virus.
I doubt that you can use our game for university thesis, but it should be enough to enjoy play :slight_smile:

A virus usually mutates a lot and does create many unique sub-groups. So if a virus cell in america mutates some times, sibiran cells do mutate in another way. It would be possible to simulate this behaviour in some way, but gameplay wise we will use global data so there is just one virus-type on earth.
Plague Inc. and such games do work the same way.

I’ve added an entry on Steam Concepts. Please visit the page an vote for us.

very cool idea!

It has been a while…
Anyhow I want to present you our Main Theme of PreCIV composed by Samuel McAlpine.

PreCIV OST - Main Theme

Also you can find some new images here.

Trying to keep this alive :slight_smile:
Here are some parasite designs:

Macrophage

Nanobot

They look good, keep working.

Oh Boy, your earth looks absolutely great! What kind of shader did u use for it? I had to show a earth model like yours once in a project, but did not manage to make it as beautiful as yours… The game itself sounds awesome, can’t wait to see some video footage or some more screenshots. Great work so far!

btw: Your community site linked above seems to be down or link is broken