Well, for whatever reason I wound up reading the site again. Serendipitously, this also seems to be around the time Virgil, best moderator of all time, and @Karn have returned as well. If I could choose one more person to reappear out of the blue, it’d be Wolfram.
I don’t remember when I left, but I had been hinting at something I was “working on.”
All of that work is gone, except for this WIP model I found on an old drive. I’d been working on a relatively complicated simulation. These things didn’t just think “need food, get food.” They had “memories.”
So instead of just wandering to food on the map, they’d run through a list of food items that they had encountered. Then they would take these locations, and judge events based on them. For example, if they remembered eating berries at a bush but they also encountered wanton carnage near that bush, they would rank that as a lower priority food source.
They would also forget things relatively quickly. And they didn’t just want “food” either. They had preferences. As in, if their genetic code decided they liked food with a sweetness of 8, sourness of 0, softness of 3, and color of yellow, etc then they would go crazy for bananas.
But they didn’t just magically see bananas and know that they were good. They had to taste them to store that in their “memory.”
Speaking of genetics, breeding was one of the easiest mechanics to get running. It was highly customizable as well. But I was always torn when it came to colors. Should every hue be available? Or only specific, preset swatches? I think every hue is a better option. Behind the scenes I could look at a color’s RGB values and just bump them into the nearest “color” for labeling purposes.
The core gameplay loop was… nothing. You just watched it play out. Eventually I wanted to add first-person player interaction.
How far did it get? Not farther than what’s in this post. The food and hunger “memory” and need system was a prototype that I’d hoped to apply to everything else. Relationships, nesting, entertainment, etc.
Might redo the breeding system next weekend. Will probably update the model first since it bothers me that this WIP model is only 80% done. It will probably never have textures since I’m not very good at that.
