Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution News

Still too buggy for stable release, but we're getting closer! (Which isn't to say that it's less buggy than 0.11.2.5, I've actually fixed a lot. It's differently buggy)

Changelog:

* Adjusted balance calculations to be significantly more realistic
* Adjusted childhood to 'pull' a consistent amount of energy each frame, and childhood length to depend on total energy spent (rather than pulling a variable amount depending on childhood length).
- This will fix the problem with food energy flickering up and down.

* Increased 'base' stamina amount (to make adulthood easier).
* Increased childhood cost of primitive organisms (will make childhood longer)

* Fixed a bug registering live creatures as "inedible" and preventing hunting
* Fixed a bug making scavenging meat significantly rarer
* Fixed an issue with empathy cost being applied to creatures outside the predators species (which stacked with the first issue to prevent hunting).
* Fixed bug preventing brain report (eg. "Hunger >> Graze") from appearing in UI.
* Fixed crash when reviving creatures
* Fixed crash when using any god tool with both creatures and corpses selected
* Fixed potential crash when mating/gene splicing.
* Fixed a bug causing the skybox to render at half resolution and show distant mountains on the 'ocean' maps, which was never intended.

* Zoomed the camera in to show creatures at a better scale in the clade diagram/satellite map/gene editor
* Displayed balance forces in the gene editor when "Draw Bones" is selected.
* Activated the nursery UI when the first creature is dropped in, to better help players understand how it's supposed to work.
* Adjusted camera movement to be slightly less floaty

Now available on the Steam experimental branch.



Changes:

* Gene Editor now includes a "Draw Bones" option, allowing you to visualize the skeletal physics that govern creatures body plans.
* Made dragging torso bones along the ground cost more in walk speed
* Increased cost of balance problems
* Reduced cost of compressive stress problems
* Caused Pregnancy Length to double after each litter born, making it necessary for creatures to increase their litter size if they want to engage in r-select strategies.
* Adjusted growth cost gradient to be more costly for simple creatures and less costly for complex ones

* Fixed bug preventing gene splice from working
* Fixed bug preventing corpses from being revived
* Fixed bug preventing corpses from showing up on the Sat Map
* Fixed visual bug showing the creature total as "CAPPED" indefinitely, despite the population dropping off

Early adopters rejoice! I've just put Species 0.12.0, the Multithreading Update, up on the Experimental Beta Branch on Steam!

0.12.0 adds multithreading to the underlying game engine, significantly increasing the performance (and Creature Count) of the game on computers with Dual-Core, Quad-Core, Octo-Core or Septendec-Core CPU's.

Please note that this is an Experimental Build. It is likely to be less stable and less performant (though still more performant than 0.11!) than the version that will be soon released to all Steam users.

You can access the Beta branch by right-clicking on "Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution", selecting "Properties", then opening the "Betas" branch and selecting "experimental - Unstable Experimental Builds" from the drop down.



At the moment, 0.12.0 adds no features or tweaks: it's the same game, but faster. In addition to the obvious stability work, I will be polishing it in the coming weeks to make the survival strategies and body plans more varied and interesting, as well as see if I can make carnivory more viable.

In the currently released version of species, I can handle about 1100 creatures with an average FPS of 12.



In the current 0.12.0 Multithreading Prototype, I’m getting more than twice that. 2600 creatures with the same average FPS.



I think we can call this a success. 😀



There’s still a few bugs specific to the multithreading implementation, and further optimization to do, but they’re limited in scope and I’m pretty sure I can see the path ahead, so I’m happy to say that, barring any ‘incidents’ between now and then…

0.12.0 (Experimental) will be released to a Steam Beta Branch within the week.

Once that happens I will begin a stability pass to fix all of the crashings forever prior to 0.12.0’s official release. (Okay fine, most of the crashings forever. Gotta be realistic here).

And after 0.12.0 is properly released, I will be releasing regular polish updates for a while to reduce the effectiveness of limbless and herbivorous survival strategies and hopefully improve carnivores ability to survive.

Cheers,
Qu

I've been paying attention to the Steam reviews and the exception reports flowing into my inbox, and have been compiling a list of crashes and related stability issues to address. I haven't been able to get to them yet because I'm a leettle bit desperate to get multithreading out of the way, but upon my oath: as soon as 0.12.0 is released, there will be a reckoning.

Ever seen The Purge? I haven't, but it's like that, except with a lot more bugfixing and slightly less murder.



Part of said reckoning will be a change to more robust coding practices. Currently, when the game encounters a bug it fails immediately. Great for me as a coder trying to identify problems: terrible for you as someone trying to play a game.

Instead of doing that awful thing, I will adjust the code to absorb the error, log it to the bug report and kill off the creature responsible out of spite before attempting to continue. This will give us the best of both worlds, at the cost of creatures dying instead of losing their anchor to the third dimension and ascending into the space between worlds, or whatever actually happens to you when your position become NaN ("Not A Number"). Thinking about it now, killing them when that happens is probably a mercy.



As far as Multithreading 0.12.0 goes...it's aliiiive! (by specific definitions of the word "alive") The Species development build now has a "Multithreaded mode" and it doesn't crash when you switch to it! All my evil schemes are coming to fruition. Except the one with the dinosaur soldiers. I'm thinking it's probably best to cut my losses on that one at this point.

Multithreaded mode currently utilizes quite a bit more of the CPU than before (up to ~40% from ~15% on my laptop, which has a quad core processor) and provides a very noticeable performance boost at high creature counts. There's still a combination of refactoring, optimizing and bugfixing to do (if I can get that percentage up to 80% or more I'll be very happy), and I've somehow managed to turn delicious meat into an inedible object (whoops), but we're definitely getting there.



For science!

Quasar