So I'm gonna try my hand at making an evolution simulator.
…And no, it's not gonna be a Spore clone.User input will be pretty basic. You'll pretty much just define the environments and set it in motion.When FPS starts to drop to an unreasonable level, which it undoubtedly will with hundreds of organisms crawling around, the sim will kill off 50% of the population. But it'll give the player a choice as to what kills this 50%, whether it's a flood or asteroid or whatever. This choice will determine exactly which organisms die off during this mass extinction, thus changing the course of evolution.I toyed around with the idea of creating a DNA-like code for the organisms that actually determines their traits, but I think actually creating a meaningful organism-defining code that can mutate randomly to result in random new features would be too difficult. Not to mention that if I did somehow get something like that working, it'd probably take way too long for notable changes to occur.Instead, there will just be a variety of random mutations that a new organism might be born with. The random mutations will have prerequisites though, which will prevent a basic cell-like organism from suddenly sprouting advanced eyes or something.
I don't get why people hate on Spore so much on the internet. I played it and loved it. It took what I loved about Empire Earth II and made it so much better. I just wish It was a little more complex and not as cartoon.
I did this sort of thing for my Computing project last year when I was at school. There were 3 types of organisms - predators, prey, and plants - and each new, reproduced organism mutated its size, speed, sight and camouflage slightly from it's parent.
It worked but I never got round to actually balancing the algorithms or the initial values so that they evolved in interesting ways. Because I'm lazy.There were 3 main things that happened in my simulated environment depending on the settings:1) Basically the environment couldn't support life. Everything died.2) The predators gradually evolved until they became these absurd creatures which whizzed around at phenomenal speed, eating everything in their sight because they were using so much energy. Then everything died.3) The prey reproduced like super-rabbits. Nobody died. Except my computer. My computer died.Not hating on Spore, LAR Games. It's just much more game-ish than it is an actual evolution simulator.
@Toast - Yeah, I fear getting the algorithms balanced will be very tricky. My system might be even more so… I don't plan on having pre-defined classes of organisms like predators, prey and plants.I wouldn't consider Spore a life sim so much as a biology-themed game.
Download
I think that's the most recent version but if you get errors, let me know and I'll upload a new one.As others have said, most of the difficulty is not in programming interactions between plants and animals but in balancing out the system so that it is self-sustaining. I made sure to give each creature some pros and cons. So, for example, carnivores are agile and powerful, but they also produce less young and don't need to eat as often. Herbivores, meanwhile, have a stronger defense and produce more offspring. Omnivores are somewhere in between. Originally I was finding that omnivores always won out over time, so I had to weaken them a bit.As far as evolution goes, I introduced mutations at random, but after that, they were self-perpetuating. Faster animals tended to beat out slower animals, until eventually all the animals were faster than their ancestors.Anyways! Have fun poking around the source (or just edit it and make it your own, I don't care). Let me know if you have any questions!Hmm. I get an error right when it starts.
Downloading the source now.
I envision my sim working is that the world starts out with a simple cell-like organism that multiplies and ultimately evolves into different species, rather than having pre-determined Carni/Herbi/Omnivores.How I think I'll accomplish this is that instead of having a single, featureless world like a lot of these things tend to have, there will be different areas with different attributes (such as being water or land, climate, etc…), which in turn favor certain evolutionary paths. So unlike a lot of these things where the organisms just get "better" and must either reach some sort of cap or, for example, become ridiculously fast, they'll only be evolving to better suit whatever environment they've made their primary home in. They might be the best of their species in their own environment, but wander outside of it and they might not be well-suited to face the other environments they find.Saving it and re-opening it didn't work… I'll just try opening it up on my Mac later tonight, see if that does the trick.
Nevermind, fixed it. Some of the functions for drawing/creating sprites were changed up a bit in GM8, so I just had to cut out a couple arguments that are no longer necessary. :)