World Population Creator / News: Recent posts

After a huge break, I've decided to post the latest updates to WPC that I've been working on.

The program has been completly rebuilt from the ground up, using new data structures, new algorithims, new graphics.

At the moment, the program is still in beta, with the creation and graphics algorithms running fine, while the population genetics agorithims are still being re-wrote.

The program compiles, runs and creates the starting dataset.

Hmm, the previous version of my program handled up to 70,000 concurrent people, which happened to be way too low for any serious evolution, (I hope for a number somwhere between 10 to 20 times that) I decieded to impliment a procedure to change a Person into a DeadPerson, a class which should take up much less space than a full person. All refrences to dead People would then be removed, and replaced with DeadPerson references, allowing the Garbage collector to pick up unneeded people.... read more

After a short break, from programming, due to an annoying issue in the program, which is causing the second generation never to have babies, and therefore die out, I decided to leave that area altogether and start in a new direction.

WPC now has a simple GUI, providing an interface for the important information, and giving the user a higher level of control over how the program runs. The user can now start and stop the simulation at will, and can slow it down, or speed it up. The year, current towns, total population and population change are also shown.... read more

Small problem coming up. I'm getting a null pointer exeception after a random number of years. Its happenening in Person, line 228, a piece of code that should only ever return an int, and always an int. I dont see how the problem is there, but its most likely down to my sloppy coding!

If anyone works it out before I do, feel free to post in the forums about it.

Willister

I just have to work on one last procedure, a special add procedure, which creates a family/non family connection for new people added to a starting town.

Once this is finished, it will mean that I can start an "accelerated" world, with a set number of towns and people, and have a fully functual family tree from the outset.

As soon as that is running, ill be giving the program its first evolutionary run, a small 25000 year stint, and see what errors I have :-P

Well, I've finally figured out how to upload my files with TortoiseCVS. Ended up using its built in ssh program, as it wouldn't work with my copy of ssh secure shell, but thats not a problem.

I'm gonna wait till tommorrow, to check that everything is working, by checking that the files are available on the anonymous server, and then the next stage of development can start.

Well, today is Friday the 14th, the start of World Population Creator on SourceForge. The projects humble begings were as a discusion between me and my girlfriend about story writing. The idea behind it is to create a full populated world of any technology level, with full infomation on the people behind it.

Having this world would mean that a story or game writer could focus on the main story characters, or game program, and leave the filling of the world to this program. If your character passes through a town, why waste time thinking of all the names, ages, jobs and looks of all the people he could meet? Why not just pull a town out of this program? Much easier!... read more