Devlog 3

It’s been a long time! After a lot of procrastinating and trial and error, and banging my head against the wall trying to figure out evolution, I decided to pivot. I kept the genome system, but scrapped the evolution in favour of manual tuning

Genomes

I went over this in the last devlog but I’ll mention it again cause it’s important and it’s changed a little. The current system works with a fixed number of species, each with a unique genome. A genome is made of 3 traits (0 to 1) and 3 receptors (-1 to 1) and each receptor interacts with it’s respective trait on a neighbouring particle. For example, if Trait 1 on Particle A is 1, and Receptor 2 on Particle B is also 1, B will be attracted to A. Likewise, if Receptor 1 on Particle B is -1, B will be repelled by A

Rendering

Aside from solidifying the genome system, the biggest change from the last update is a full shift to GPU rendering. The previous version used Pygame to draw the window, but now I’m using Taichi’s UI library. The benefits of this are that information is no longer being sent between the CPU and GPU, significantly increasing speed. Also, the rendering itself is parallelized, making it even faster.

Other Changes

I added detailed controls for changing population, species count, genomes, visuals and more. I also added a system to save and load configurations.

Next?

I’m gonna leave this project for a bit, but I might come back to it in the future. If I do, I want to find some way to turn it into a live wallpaper / screensaver.

It’s like the moon!