At least on my machine, interesting developments usually take several hours. Often i wonder which creature the new creatures are descended from. Biogenesis provides the # of the parent organism, but that's not usually very helpful.
The following is (i think) a simple idea that should allow the tracking of creatures over generations.
• Naming.
Currently each creature is distinguished by an ID #. But most people don't remember multiple numbers easily. I propose that the user can "name" any creature that strikes his fancy. This name would be displayed in addition to or instead of the numerical ID. Any creatures that are imported would by default be named after the file name (minus the extension).
• Progenitor Info
The name becomes useful if the little info window would displays an organism's progenitor's name or ID. The progenitor ID would only display if it had no name. The "progenitor" is a creature's most distant ancestor OR the most recent ancestor to be given a name.
So by default if you start the game with 50 new creatures, the Progenitor's ID for all future creatures will be 1 through 50. After a dozen generations, i expect that only a few of the 50 progenitors have living descendants. Maybe all creatures would be descended from a single Progenitor (something i'd like to check). When the first semi-competent mobile predator develops, i'd "name" him "proto-mosquito" and wonder if it takes over the world. When i come back after a couple hours, i can quickly check the various types of creature and see if proto-mosquito's children dominated, or if a similar form developed independently.
Or i might release a few copies of "mosquito" and "yehat" into a newly started world, and wait a few hours to see which of them was the most successful. (I think it would be mosquito.)
This is a little wordy, but hopefully explains why i'd like to see this feature.
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That's a good idea and I was thinking about something similar. My idea was to optionally save the genetic code of all ancestors of the current living organisms, so at any moment one can see the family tree of any organism on the screen. Or maybe that the program creates a web page with this information and save it on hd.
This way one could not only see if a creature is a descendant of another, but all the evolutionary steps that lead from one to the other. This have a cost in memory too.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
On one side a tree of life would be awesome, but it should not make the
program really slower, because i sim mostly with large
worlds to have more species, micro-environments and so on. Furthermore it is
less probable for a species to day out simply by the way of luck, when it has
a larger population.
Apart from that, it´s possible to find out, which organisms are related.
Mostly there is one or more genes, which don`t change too much. Because
rotation and length for a segment gene can have many more values in version
0.7 than in earlier versions, it is extremely improbable that two organisms
with the same gene, for example "Lenght 4,3" and "Rotation 25" have not the
same ancestor.
Greets Marco
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I was thinking that as well as the generation counter you could have a species
age counter.
This could show you, after 1000 generations, that a particular species has
survived unchanged for 500 generations.
When an organism reproduces if it also mutates then the 'species Gen' is set
to its generation number.
However if the organism is born without mutations the its 'species Gen' is set
to the generation number of the parent.
When this is displayed to the user it is done in the form of 'Generation minus
Species Gen'.
This figure will increase as generations of unmutated children are born.
The problem with this is that the ancestors statistics are not updated.
Therefore looking at two individuals with identical genes you would see that
one (say the grand mother and first in species) was Species Age 0 and the
other (grand child) was species age 2.
Whereas what would be correct is that the grandmother also says Species Age 2.
I am sure you know if that is easy to implement.
What do you think?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
At least on my machine, interesting developments usually take several hours. Often i wonder which creature the new creatures are descended from. Biogenesis provides the # of the parent organism, but that's not usually very helpful.
The following is (i think) a simple idea that should allow the tracking of creatures over generations.
• Naming.
Currently each creature is distinguished by an ID #. But most people don't remember multiple numbers easily. I propose that the user can "name" any creature that strikes his fancy. This name would be displayed in addition to or instead of the numerical ID. Any creatures that are imported would by default be named after the file name (minus the extension).
• Progenitor Info
The name becomes useful if the little info window would displays an organism's progenitor's name or ID. The progenitor ID would only display if it had no name. The "progenitor" is a creature's most distant ancestor OR the most recent ancestor to be given a name.
So by default if you start the game with 50 new creatures, the Progenitor's ID for all future creatures will be 1 through 50. After a dozen generations, i expect that only a few of the 50 progenitors have living descendants. Maybe all creatures would be descended from a single Progenitor (something i'd like to check). When the first semi-competent mobile predator develops, i'd "name" him "proto-mosquito" and wonder if it takes over the world. When i come back after a couple hours, i can quickly check the various types of creature and see if proto-mosquito's children dominated, or if a similar form developed independently.
Or i might release a few copies of "mosquito" and "yehat" into a newly started world, and wait a few hours to see which of them was the most successful. (I think it would be mosquito.)
This is a little wordy, but hopefully explains why i'd like to see this feature.
That's a good idea and I was thinking about something similar. My idea was to optionally save the genetic code of all ancestors of the current living organisms, so at any moment one can see the family tree of any organism on the screen. Or maybe that the program creates a web page with this information and save it on hd.
This way one could not only see if a creature is a descendant of another, but all the evolutionary steps that lead from one to the other. This have a cost in memory too.
On one side a tree of life would be awesome, but it should not make the
program really slower, because i sim mostly with large
worlds to have more species, micro-environments and so on. Furthermore it is
less probable for a species to day out simply by the way of luck, when it has
a larger population.
Apart from that, it´s possible to find out, which organisms are related.
Mostly there is one or more genes, which don`t change too much. Because
rotation and length for a segment gene can have many more values in version
0.7 than in earlier versions, it is extremely improbable that two organisms
with the same gene, for example "Lenght 4,3" and "Rotation 25" have not the
same ancestor.
Greets Marco
Joan, Great program! Thanks!
I was thinking that as well as the generation counter you could have a species
age counter.
This could show you, after 1000 generations, that a particular species has
survived unchanged for 500 generations.
When an organism reproduces if it also mutates then the 'species Gen' is set
to its generation number.
However if the organism is born without mutations the its 'species Gen' is set
to the generation number of the parent.
When this is displayed to the user it is done in the form of 'Generation minus
Species Gen'.
This figure will increase as generations of unmutated children are born.
The problem with this is that the ancestors statistics are not updated.
Therefore looking at two individuals with identical genes you would see that
one (say the grand mother and first in species) was Species Age 0 and the
other (grand child) was species age 2.
Whereas what would be correct is that the grandmother also says Species Age 2.
I am sure you know if that is easy to implement.
What do you think?
I'm looking forward to the changes above. When available. I could help in some way?