Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution News

You can opt in to the experimental branch by right clicking on "Species", selecting "Properties" and going to the "Betas" tab.



Changelog:

* Added survival need icons for at-a-glance assessment of the Player Creatures state.
* Fixed a crash that could occur when too many corpses existed in the world.
* Once again tried to fix the crash coming from the Immediate Family Tree.
- Also implemented some code to help provide more detail in the error message if this doesn't work.

Changelog

* Re-implemented the "Diet" pie chart on Species Overview page to show the ratio of meat/grass/tree's that the species has been consuming.
* Fixed a crash that could occur when siblings in the Immediate Family Tree didn't match siblings in the game. Again.
* Adjusted player camera to look ahead of creature instead of directly at it.
* Tweaked general movement to be slightly less oxygen intensive.

You can opt in to the experimental branch by right clicking on "Species", selecting "Properties" and going to the "Betas" tab.

Changelog:

* Fixed game incorrectly displaying creatures as siblings/children in the Family Tree after they are die and are re-born to different parents
- This happened because, as a performance optimization, the game re-uses the Creature object instead of destroying it. This can occasionally cause... strangeness.
* Fixed crash that could occur when siblings in the Immediate Family Tree didn't match siblings in the game
* Fixed crash in Quickstart, when selecting a creature type from the drop down menu
* Fixed crash that could occur if a creature swam/was moved out of map bounds.
* Fixed possible crash when exporting creatures if the exported creature file list is full

Changelog:

* Renamed the Stamina bar to 'Fatigue'.
- Words cannot begin to describe how confusing the code was becoming due to having multiple Stamina leg genes and a Stamina phenotype stat which affected the Stamina loss in a Stamina energy bar with a variable Max Stamina.
* Simplified the Fatigue bar mechanics. It will fall slowly while awake and rise slowly while asleep, and will no longer consume calories from Food to regenerate.
* Complicatified the Oxygen bar mechanics. Oxygen will be consumed when performing exercise, and will replace Fatigue as a 'sprint bar'.
- This means creatures will gasp for air when exhausted instead of passing out on the spot, which is a lot more logical (albeit less funny).
* Fixed a crash when the Player Creature dies and the game tries to switch to a dead sibling.
* Fixed a graphical glitch with the 'Mate' behavior sprite

And on the subject of good news, 0.13.1.0 has just been published to the Experimental branch.




This version includes the (admittedly somewhat unpolished) "Play as Creature" feature, which allows you to do the thing I just said, and also other things, which I will now elucidate upon.

After selecting a critter and clicking the "Play as Creature" button, the camera will follow the selected creature around.



You can then right click on the ground, trees, other creatures or even yourself to demand the creature obey your will, and it will do so! ... probably. Creature's still have their own survival instincts and if they desperately need to get oxygen or food, for example, they're unlikely to pay attention to "huddle" demands for very long.

In addition to controlling the minds of complacent beings, the game will also track the creatures immediate family members for you (parents, siblings and offspring). This allows you to switch targets whenever you feel like it, or automatically in the event that your chosen avatar suffers a severe case of the deaths.



Naturally, being able to observe a creatures lifecycle so intimately like this will bring some of the AI's flaws into stark relief. This is a good thing: it makes abundantly obvious that a number of things need fixing, and I will be focusing a lot of  development time on those flaws in the near future.

Additionally, turning Species into a miniature survival game at this level has given me a lot of idea's, and I'll be drawing inspiration from the gameplay experience of actual survival games as I move forward. Obviously this will make 'play as creature' more fun, but more importantly it will make the in-game evolution more intuitive and interesting, since survival will come to depend more on "playing the game" and than on finding ways to exploit it.

I'll discuss those idea's soon. I'm very much looking forward to the coming weeks,

Qu