Daniel Lambert

Dust to Dividends is my particle simulation colony sim, built around mining, farming, industry, and a world that keeps reacting. Powders pile up, liquids flow, gases spread, and heat changes what materials become. Around 1,600 reactions connect the simulation to everything from metal refining and chemical manufacturing to food production.

Build conveyors, pumps, and pipes to keep a factory moving while taking care of the people who work there. Colonists need food, water, beds, and somewhere to socialize; crops need water and nutrients. Sell goods to visiting customers, ship products out on trading rovers, or build a shared colony with friends in cooperative multiplayer.

The materials, chemistry, heat, vegetation, and worker behavior run on the GPU. It is an ongoing project built in Godot, with room for both a steel mill and a sandwich shop.

Check out Dust to Dividends on itch.io for the Windows build, screenshots, and development updates.

In May 2023, Boise State’s NASA SUITS, Micro-g NExT, and Autonomous Robotic Systems teams brought lunar field testing to Boise. At former astronaut Steve Swanson’s home, the teams tested augmented- and extended-reality displays and miniature rovers with Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, and NASA flight director Greg Whitney.

Boise State captured the day in “Boise’s backyard astronauts”. I’m in the group photo above, wearing red in the back row.

The NASA SUITS work brought spatial mapping, sensor data, networking, and telestration into a heads-up display for spacesuit operations. I built a system that let people on Earth walk through a real-time spatial reconstruction of an astronaut’s environment on the Moon. They could place annotations within that environment, and the astronaut could see those annotations in the corresponding physical locations. The project was developed in Boise and demonstrated at Johnson Space Center.

From 2003 to 2007, I served in the United States Air Force at McGuire Air Force Base as a KC-10A Flying Crew Chief. I was responsible for the safety of flight and maintenance of my aircraft at home and abroad, supervising specialists during maintenance and training new aircraft-maintenance professionals.

The work took me around the world in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and operations in the Horn of Africa. I was selected as a Flying Crew Chief because of my troubleshooting ability, a role that demanded calm diagnosis, exacting work, and ownership of the aircraft wherever it landed.