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The Bibites 0.4.2 alpha 2: Variations and Information (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-27 19:22:58
Edited:
2022-04-27 19:25:03
Imported:
2022-10

Downloads

Content

This update is more foundational than anything, but also added a few fun things. I added a way to display useful information related to settings that, for now, is only used for spawner settings, but will be useful in the future, and did some background work for the next alpha release.

More procedural sprites Variations

Thanks to our loved Ophelia ( @Braxiations), we now have additional procedural sprites variations!

  • The defense gene now produces smoother transitions toward full shells (moving from 3 steps to 7)
  • Mouth sprites now have 1 additional step ( 2 to 3) for the larger sizes
  • A lot more arm sprites for different speeds

We are also working on an eventual fat system and Ophelia has produced the first body sprite variations for this! Don't tell anyone 🤫


Changes

  • Added movement penalty for defense
  • Added defense movement penalty setting
  • Increased default pheromones strength
  • Added default pheromone strength setting
  • Added "Initial Seeding" setting controlling what % of the biomass is initialy spawned
  • Increased default (and background) mutation rates
  • Decreased default 9and background mutation strengths
  • Added Information Pop-up for spawner settings


Bugfixes

  • Fixed PheroHeading neurons not enabling sensing by themselves
  • Fixed scaling problem with modded pellet sprites
  • Fixed auto-panning not working


Comments

Ph1234k

Thanks for your work! ALife is one of my favorite explorations. I do notice the simulation is hard on the bibites. Specifically there are a ton of selection pressures, finding a good feeding strategy, surviving long enough to make children (this is the biggest issue imo since until you can start procreating you cannot really start evolving - that's not to say the random spawning doesn't help induce that evolution, but it would happen much faster if we can get bibites to reproduce much faster), avoiding death by collision. So a lot of time, you will end up with a bibite that can find food very well for example, but that gets eliminated by collision because of how long it has to just stay alive before a baby is made. I would say it is important to remember that if we want to see interesting evolution, we should look towards the first lifeforms which were very small and reproduced very quickly. Without a fast enough reproduction cycle, it is extremely difficult to get past extinction events such as a collision in the bibite world. This in turn creates a large amount of pressure as I mentioned to require a substantial "kit" before evolution can start. E.g. Without the birth of a virgin bibite that can eat well AND defend itself from a simple collision, you just watch hours and hours of 1st generation bibites that die to starvation or collisions. Ideas I have to help move towards faster evolution, they are not intended to be all added but rather individual soltutions: 1. Have a special virgin bibite spawn that has the needed tools for basic survival - this has an unfortunate effect of preventing you from watching said system evolve but bootstraps evolution. 2. Rework colliding to not be so damaging or to cause no damage, and then add another feature to allow bibites to damage each other (such as an intentional biting, or something like a spike so that collisions are deadly but it has a cost associated with making a collision deadly) 3. Make bibites reproduce faster than they do now by default, allowing them to slow down reproduction as evolution allows instead of pressuring them to speed it up before success. If you read all this, thanks for your time.

leocaussan
>>85008203

Thanks for the kind comments 😁! I'll consider all that. Especially #1, I really need to make the default bibites better 🤔 or at least give the option to spawn better ones !

leocaussan

Yeah, by nerfing the plant energy and adding digestion, everything had to slow down a lot. Increasing the digestion rate of plants and increasing the default growth rate would bring you back to something similar to what it was. Maybe I could add a bunch of preset settings that users could choose from 🤔

Carson
>>85057335

I love the preset idea! It would also help out for the community if we could export and import presets too! For example, by making it easy to replicate an environment someone creates that tends to generate certain niches of bibites. Edit: Just checked and realized saving and loading sim settings is already in the game. I still think having some varied presets is a good idea though!