I've always been tinkering with the idea of making a life simulator. Not like the sims though. One where you have a predefined set of physical laws (gravity, air etc.) that can be used to make different life forms evolve. Like, if a creature needs to eat meat but has to kill other creatures to get it, it would evolve fangs, claws or something like that.
Do you guys think it can be done in MMF, and has anyone done it before ?
I already tried that. It's a great game, but not exactly what i'm looking for. I want the game to make the evolution choices on its own. Then again, i gotta start somwhere so an Evo approach might be what's needed.
You could do it. Massively scaled down from realistic evolution, of course, and it would take a hell of a lot of time to code and balance. And after all that the end result wouldn't be very impressive. But it could be done.
That's what i've been thinking too. I guess, if you were to program it in 3D (which i'm not), you could put in some random parameters so the shapes of necks, tales, other body parts would turn out different from each other. In 2D everything has to be drawn...
unless you could make it vector based... hmm...
Well ... coding wise it should absolutely be possible. It would be a bit hard, but certainly not impossible.
The main thing is the gfx as you already know. Even if the game was limited to only 100 creatures (including all the possible stages of a species, say 10 species, 10 evolutionary steps) would require 100 creatures fully animated. Thats a lot of work allthough 10 species with 10 evolutionary steps each is quite limited gameplay wise (thinking millions? )
One approach you could try is to have each creature consist of multiple parts (multiple objects). Like, head, body, legs, tail or even more like: head, mouth, eyes etc. Doing too many parts would be a bitch to code though. However a moderate amount of parts could be done. Then mixing the parts randomly would mean more possibilites with less objects.
A simple example. A creature consists of a head object and a body object (the body object includes legs and perhaps a tail). Doing 10 heads and 10 bodys would be: 10*10=100 possible outcomes out of 20 objects instead of doing 100 full objects. See the picure ?
OMG IVE HAD THAT EXACT SAME IDEA FOR A GAME!!! like you could take a rabbit or some random creature, hold it in the sky and after so many hours it would develop wings etc! Weird.
and i had the exact same idea a year ago . And what if you could make them evolve different things depending on what they need. For instance, if a big baludska attacked a blobber 30 or more times, the blobber would evolve a strong shield on its back, or if a small creature always gets attacked by birds, it eveolves big claws to dig under ground. the only problem is the graphics, like u said...
i guess the only way to make that would be to just make a few standard creatures, and then just make addons to them (other active objects). I'd recommend it to MMF users though. It'd be quite painful for TGF, when u think of its 250 object limit .
but this still isn't much of a game. But one idea would be to make a creature editor, and then the player has to choose what to evolve, and try to make his creature the dominating creature of the planet
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It would be pretty hard with MMF to make things "Evolve" graphically. Because all of the pictures would be predefined as you would draw them yourself. If MMF supported vector graphics then you would be able to morph the creatures. But otherwise, it's a bit hard graphics-wise to make the creatures look unique.
This certainly sounds interesting. Have you read my article?
Basically, what do you hope to get out of this?
Wanna make a simple code, and watch it head towards entropy?
This is simple. Just make an objects with random values, then when two objects collide, they have sex. Then they create a new object which has the average of each of the values +or- 1.
Now, you could have fun if you made sure that each of the factors caused issues in each extreeme. For example, extra speed means more sex, (as more collisions) but it means energy is used quicker, which leads to starvation. More muscle, means you can be higher up the food chain, but once again, it takes more energy, which could also lead to starvation.
You could have gender speccific charectoristics. Maybe male and female start of with the same values, but the +or-1 affects each differently. You could also have chances of producing male, and chances of producing female a charactoristic. You could have a time of pregnancy, where the creature is incapable of becoming pregnant again until it gives birth. What you'll find, is that the females will become more slow, and numerous. This is because firstly, you need more females to make up for lost time as each one gets pregnant, and also, it's best for females to have fewer collisions, as they become sitting ducks when pregnant.
Though, if that's not your thing, and you just want to make some cool graphics, try mixing and matching a variety of different heads, bodies, tails etc. and make it so that any combination can work as a seperate animal. Develop a means of reproducing, and watch what they come up with as they cross breed.
Or maybe you'd rather have the emphasis on the strong defeating the weak. So, you'd produce weak charectoristics, which +or-1 from generation to generation. Then have the strong guys eat the weak guys, and watch them all as they become more powerful.
If you really want to get into artificial life, you just gotta include neuro pathways. Though, you'll have to study it before you can code it, but it is the essanse of learning. If you teach each creature to learn the difference between a success and a failure, it will learn tricks to success that even you hadn't thought of. Blank neuro pathways, in theory, have the potential to outsmart the person who wrote them.
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I had a game idea a bit like this, where you could breed a type of creature, and then fight them. Their 'DNA' would have been stored in a .dna file, the idea being that you can send them over the 'net, maybe even buy them using a credits system.
I wanted it to work in a kinda financial businesslike way. People can apply for Designer status, which gives them the ability to edit the genes of creatures. However, they have to pay a huge amount to get this status. They can take out a 'loan' of credits, but they have to be sure that their product will sell enough to at least break even.
I have been looking into neuro pathways. I saw a documentary earlier this week that showed some guy who built robots with analog neuro pathways. They learned to walk in many different ways. Already there i got the idea of making neuro pathways. I might just study it though, it seems extremely interesting.
I think a good and "easy" way of doing it is using the body parts approach. Then use the same way of evolution bacteria have. Let's say a couple makes 5 babies and these babies are "assembled" almost randomly (while still being influenced by the parents). If any of these babies needed razorsharp teeth to survive but only 1 of them had these, only the baby with the teeth would survive, etc. etc.
I made a screensaver like this, where it began mainly with smaller roaming organisms and as they fed on each other they evolved into larger, more complicated entities. You can create the simpliest of AIs, but I can't imagine that it could get too intricate. Ultimately the game will be acting soley on the events you create, and I think something has to reach a certain complexity before a majority of people classify it as Artificial Intelligence.
I don't think MMF2, or even normal home computers have the computing capacity to recreate AIs that resemble the higher intelligences of primates and such; I think you're stuck recreating reptilian AIs, or basic types of that nature.
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. And what if you could make them evolve different things depending on what they need. For instance, if a big baludska attacked a blobber 30 or more times, the blobber would evolve a strong shield on its back, or if a small creature always gets attacked by birds, it eveolves big claws to dig under ground. the only problem is the graphics, like u said...
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Edited by the Author.