Development Update #10 - Evolution Update First Look
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the tenth development update. I'm currently finishing one of the bigger updates Ecosystem has had so far, the Evolutionary Sandbox update. This update is all about interactions with creatures and adding ways to influence both the ecosystem you're building and the evolutionary path of the creatures in it.
That includes allowing you to adjust a lot of higher-level properties of the environment, such as the amount of drag the water imparts on objects moving through it, substantially affecting the bodies and swimming styles that evolution will select for. You can also control things like the mass and muscle density of a species, the energy cost each neuron has, how long creatures take to mature, and how much of their life they devote to mating. It's possible to require fins, tentacles, or a tailfin, or ensure that individuals will always be symmetric even after many generations of mutations.
Work in progress look at some the options you will have access too, UI and options not final.
Size can be specified too, and in addition, much greater size variety is possible now. Creatures will be able to range from one fourth of the current default size all the way up to ten times the current default, so if you would like to have whales in your environment or to try and evolve a sea monster, it should be possible now. Color can also be specified and also has much greater variety. In particular, much brighter colors are available now, in contrast to the very subdued palette the game initially started with.
I've also put a lot of effort into adding ways to interact with creatures and making it easier and quicker to do so. It's possible to set minimum and maximum hard caps on species' populations now, which may be useful if you have a species you're developing that you want to ensure never goes extinct. All the interaction options like boosting, culling, and dragging are available immediately when you select a creature without having to switch to a separate menu, and there are new options that allow for generating a whole new species out of an interesting individual, or reviving a creature if it died while selected.
There have also been some big quality of life improvements: most notably, once they have matured, creatures now attempt keep themselves upright instead of happily swimming around upside down or at all kinds of weird angles. That had been a longstanding issue, as creatures had struggled to balance the demands of steering towards food with rotating to keep themselves up. Also, when heads are very thin, like a manta ray, they should appear more natural and less 'wooden'. This update will hopefully be available for open beta testing in a couple weeks and fully released not long after.
That's all for this update. Thanks for reading!
Tom Johnson
Welcome to the tenth development update. I'm currently finishing one of the bigger updates Ecosystem has had so far, the Evolutionary Sandbox update. This update is all about interactions with creatures and adding ways to influence both the ecosystem you're building and the evolutionary path of the creatures in it.
That includes allowing you to adjust a lot of higher-level properties of the environment, such as the amount of drag the water imparts on objects moving through it, substantially affecting the bodies and swimming styles that evolution will select for. You can also control things like the mass and muscle density of a species, the energy cost each neuron has, how long creatures take to mature, and how much of their life they devote to mating. It's possible to require fins, tentacles, or a tailfin, or ensure that individuals will always be symmetric even after many generations of mutations.
Work in progress look at some the options you will have access too, UI and options not final.Size can be specified too, and in addition, much greater size variety is possible now. Creatures will be able to range from one fourth of the current default size all the way up to ten times the current default, so if you would like to have whales in your environment or to try and evolve a sea monster, it should be possible now. Color can also be specified and also has much greater variety. In particular, much brighter colors are available now, in contrast to the very subdued palette the game initially started with.
I've also put a lot of effort into adding ways to interact with creatures and making it easier and quicker to do so. It's possible to set minimum and maximum hard caps on species' populations now, which may be useful if you have a species you're developing that you want to ensure never goes extinct. All the interaction options like boosting, culling, and dragging are available immediately when you select a creature without having to switch to a separate menu, and there are new options that allow for generating a whole new species out of an interesting individual, or reviving a creature if it died while selected.
There have also been some big quality of life improvements: most notably, once they have matured, creatures now attempt keep themselves upright instead of happily swimming around upside down or at all kinds of weird angles. That had been a longstanding issue, as creatures had struggled to balance the demands of steering towards food with rotating to keep themselves up. Also, when heads are very thin, like a manta ray, they should appear more natural and less 'wooden'. This update will hopefully be available for open beta testing in a couple weeks and fully released not long after.
That's all for this update. Thanks for reading!
Tom Johnson