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Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution News

0.14.1.3

  • Allow creatures to make their way to a nearby shadow-casting tree (if there is one) to sleep, taking advantage of the shelter it provides.
  • Reduce how rapidly growth cost scales with creature size and complexity.
  • Prevent attacked creatures from continuing to try to seek food/breed/etc during the fight.
  • Added an oxygen bar to the selected creature UI. Not sold on it. I'm going to need to redesign the UI at some point: I have a bunch of idea's on that front.
  • Encourage creatures who begin a meal to finish it. [Berates random P. specium for being picky]
  • Prevent predators from fleeing from the spoils of victory due to fear accumulated during the fight.
  • Fix pregnancy-induced fatigue loss being applied even when game is paused.
  • Fix creatures in combat drifting away from the site of combat while the game is paused.
  • Fix a number of other animation problems related to combat.
  • Fix a problem with some types of thoughts not being logged.
  • Fix pregnancy cost being incorrectly represented in mouseover energy bars.
  • Fix game crashing on startup on Linux.

0.14.1.2

Some bug fixes and tweaks. In particular, I've made the Predator and Prey start viable again.

0.14.1.2 Changes

  • Double the energy available in grass and ground cover.
  • Fix creatures getting caught in an AI-loop when seeking food near a fence.
  • Fix a problem with carnivores sometimes dying instantly during birth.
  • Increase hunger while eating, to make creatures more likely to finish their meal.
  • Increase hunger if pregnant and don't have enough energy to carry to term.
  • Fix an issue with the climate device UI not setting the devices appropriately.
  • Fix an issue with Creature Detail/Draw cap getting locked at or below their minimum.
  • Fix rovers not targeting creatures behind fences.


0.14.1.1 Changes

  • Fix selected creatures not animating or turning towards their target.

0.14.1: The Hearty Breakfast Update, is out now!

Species 0.14.1: the Hearty Breakfast Update (that's a much better name, my thanks to the steam user who suggested it), has now been released to the Stable branch on Steam.

Eggs are the centerpiece of this update, but there's a lot more than just them to talk about. The game has undergone a lot of refinement and I've made small improvements in just about every domain. These include...

Eggs: Creatures can now lay eggs as an alternative to giving birth to live young. The primary advantage of eggs is shorter pregnancies, but it also renders the offspring vulnerable to opportunistic scavengers. Egg laying is governed by two genes: Pregnancy Length and Egg Length.

Pregnancies: Carrying a pregnancy to term now consumes a great deal more energy and time than before, making them a much more potent test of a creatures ability to gather food and survive.

Broodiness: Creatures now need to make a decision to begin a pregnancy instead of it happening upon reaching automatically. This allows adult creatures to stockpile food and seek a mate prior to doing so. (Note: parthenogenic creatures can begin a pregnancy even if they fail to locate a mate, but they will still try regardless).

Diet: The dietary spectrum can now be subdivided into grazing herbivores, browsing herbivores, frugivores, ovivores and carnivores.

Notably, at some point I made it much easier than before to maintain populations of scavenging carnivores and opportunistic predators. I'm not sure which of the many changes in 0.14 prompted this behavior, but it is welcome nonetheless.



Combat: Creatures in combat are now highlighted with big red circles, and take turns trading blows until one creature dies or flees. Predators will pounce on their prey to initiate combat, and creatures fighting over food will no longer try to kill each other.

Temperature: Exposure damage is now more aggressively applied, especially when creatures are sleeping, and creatures will be able to seek shelter under shade-giving tree's to negate up to 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit).

Fatigue: Creatures get sleepy earlier than before, resulting in shorter but more frequent naps. This also gives them more ability to seek shelter before exhausting themselves and losing the ability to move.

Ambient Sounds: Biome-specific ambient soundscapes, plus a few for altitude, shores and underwater.

Procedurally Generated Fur: Fluffiness continues to be fluffy.



Mass Creature Suggestions: Creature suggestions are no longer limited to the 'Play as Creature' mode. You can give an entire population of creatures the same suggestion by selecting them all and right clicking on a target.



Regrowth-based Population Control: The option exists for population control to adjust plant regrowth speed instead of food efficiency. This is likely to result in larger population booms and crashes than the default, but is also more realistic.

Thought Log: Press 'T' while a creature is selected to show the thought log. This was intended purely as a debug tool to help me diagnose AI problems, but I enjoy how it gives the creatures a voice and will probably refine it somewhat in the future to make it part of the game proper.

Stability Improvements: 0.14.1 is significantly more stable than the 0.13.X releases were. Almost all known crashes and a great many unintended behaviors have been fixed.

There are still some known crashes that can happen with low performance, so I recommend keeping the FPS in double digits for best results.

Note: By far the most effective way to keep FPS high is to reduce the creature cap.

Technical Changes: 0.14.1 is built on .Net Core and Monogame 3.8, which is substantially different from the older versions. I'm not expecting any issues stemming from this on Windows, but the Linux and Mac builds are untested. If you're running the game on a Linux or a Mac and have any troubles, please get in touch.

Cheers,

Quasar

0.14.0 has been released to the Experimental branch!

Species 0.14.0.Ex has been pushed up to the experimental branch. You can get it by right-clicking on Species in Steam, going to Properties, selecting Betas and opting into the experimental branch.



https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/0-14-0-released-to-experimental-branch/

Features!


[h2]Eggs and Pregnancy Improvements[/h2]

Creatures have two new genes, Egg length and Pregnancy length, the greater of which determines if they will lay eggs or give birth to live young. Eggs can be broken and eaten (though doing so will risk the wrath of the parent), and serve as a kind of ‘gateway food’ to carnivory.



Reproduction is now much harsher, requiring a fair chunk of calories to be spent, and creatures have the option to postpone it if they don’t have energy they’ll need for it. Creatures can evolve a shorter and less costly pregnancy, but they do so at the expense of their offspring.

These reproductive changes seem to have had some good effects on the long term survivability of clades, making one species outcompeting the rest a less likely occurrence in this build.

[h2]Diet[/h2]
Instead of diet being a simple binary spectrum between herbivory and carnivory, creatures can now specialize to feed on ground cover, foliage, fruit, eggs or meat specifically.

[h2]Temperature and Fatigue[/h2]
Temperature is now a much harsher mistress, requiring creatures to seek shelter if they start burning or freezing. Creatures will also attempt to seek shelter before sleeping, as sleeping makes them even more vulnerable to these effects.

[h2]Ambient Soundscapes[/h2]
I added biome-specific ambient soundscapes, plus a few for things like water and altitude, to fill the void of sound in between music tracks a bit.

[h2]Procedurally Generated Fur[/h2]

Fluffy!

It won’t look quite like this in-game: I’ve yet to implement fur length or floofiness genes, so I had to crop it short. But a floofiness gene has now become vitally important to the games future development. Honestly, I don’t know how we’ve gotten this far without one.

[h2]Stability Improvements and Bug fixes[/h2]
So many bugs. So many. Their cries still haunt my nightmares, and yet I continue, for the work is not yet completed. I have become less man than monster, but I swear to you truly: it was for the greater good.

The greater good.

BTW, aquatic animals are properly viable again.

[h2]Other bits and pieces![/h2]
Regrowth based population control. You can now set the Automatic Population Control to affect plant regrowth instead of food efficiency. I’ve not made this the default because it’s less responsive, resulting in more extreme population explosions and crashes.

[h2]Thought Log.[/h2]
Press ‘T’ to show the thought log. This was only ever intended as debug functionality, but it’s cute and it gives the creatures a way to voice the incredibly messed up reasoning behind their incredibly stupid decisions.



[h2]Background tweaks[/h2]
There have been a metric ton of these. Everything from speed calculations to fatigue energy delta’s to how buoyant creatures feed on underwater plants has been tweaked, adjusted and/or re-built.

[h2]Technical Changes[/h2]

The usual disclaimers apply about this being a first-release beta (aka. an unstable and bug ridden mess), but I will note that a great many issues in the 0.13 releases have been fixed. Expect a whole new ecosystem of bugs!

Seriously though, while I have fixed as many of the existing issues as I could reach, 0.14.0 is built on a completely different foundation than 0.13. Monogame 3.8 has significantly changed under the hood from previous versions, and I fully expect that to cause problems, particularly with the Linux and Mac builds that I was unable to test before now.

This background change will also cause it to take up a fair bit more hard drive space than before: the current release clocks in at 687 MB, and I may have to increase that further to ensure the cross-platform builds have all the files they need to run and that nobody will be asked to manually download .Net Core.

Please send me an email or contact me on the unofficial discord channel, or just the Steam forums, if you experience any crashes or just , so I can get them fixed prior to pushing anything to the stable branch.

Cheers!
Quasar

On the subject of eggs...

I don't intend to just slap egg's on top of the existing game: they're just one aspect of some fairly fundamental changes to creature diet, behavior and especially reproduction.

In this last week I've shared a fair bit about those changes on the development blog, here:

https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2022/06/23/eggs-as-a-food-source/

... as well as here:

https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/eggs-as-a-reproductive-strategy/

Head on over and take a look if detailed overviews of semi-technical changes sounds like your thing! Or if you like chooks. There are pictures of chooks in the second one.

Quasar