Biofag here

Biofag here.
Why haven't decently budgeted games simulated populations, ecosystems and natural selection in their games yet?
Neither of these concepts are that hard.
Why hasn't No Mans Sky, Wakfu or other games that are supposedly simulating nature do anything like this? We have had the technology to simulation natural selection since the 80s. It's not that hard.

Other urls found in this thread:

store.steampowered.com/app/313340/
finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Frog_catching
aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-alife/
speciesgame.com/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Doesn't it eat up a lot of CPU, and also take a long time for anything to actually change significantly?

Spore tried, didn't it?
We all know how that went.

because spore was shit

kek came here to post this

No, Spore didn't do that.

Because it doesn't make money.
Wakfu used to do it relatively adequetely, but then Ankama decided that players are too dumb to be responsible for the environment and made everything just spawn for no good reason.
The reasoning for this, they say, is "to streamline the player experience." and make sure that players are racing to the top as fast as they can so they are more apt to take shortcuts via cashshop.

It's more like "Will Wright tried to do it with Spore, but then EA gave him the shaft."

Realistically, would you give a shit about any of that, say, in an action game?

What you're describing sounds like SimAnimals.

Spore didn't try this. It didn't have anything to do with ecology or natural selection.
Having random people design creatures is different from said creatures evolving.

I don't think it's worth the trouble.

Giving certain creatures predators and pray already happen in some games, fucking minecraft has wolves "hunting down" sheep.

Regarding evolution, it would take way too much time to have decent evolution happen without completelly shitting up each individual creature to the point that the mutations would be much more invasive than the lingering evolutionary traits. Not to mention that a lot of stuff would have to be constantly computed in the background of the game while you play. It's easier, cheaper, and much more consistent to just make procedurally generated creatures.

Stupid question: Unless the game severely limited player interaction with the gameworld and its creatures, wouldn't most if not all changes the creatures undergo be artificial selection rather than natural selection?

In an open world game like Fire Cry I definitely would.
It would work for any open world game with animals in it or any simulator city builder or management game. That would add so much to a like Sim city where taking care of the environment is important in most big cities.
Also you could design a management game specifically about taking care of an ecosystem. Call it national park simulator or something where fucking up would kill the local population of something. I would play that in a heart beat.
Also found vid related googling.

If there aren't any tigers then the deer population would simply be too big to control.

Artificial selection is literally no different from artificial. Most biologists don't really see a distinction.
If a human hunts elephants for their tusks so elephants evolve to no longer have tusks is that really different than if some other natural predator did the same?

Realistically all of that would take generations to take effect. For the survival/crafting/unfinished early access kind of game, it's a lot of extra work for little details in spawning.

Could be significant in a god game.

Even if you had a good motive, who is competent enough of the programmers who are left in vidya to pull it off? AFAIK, all the 'good' programmers are doing 'real' stuff like setting up China's ARG reputation system and ' synergising bitcoins in the cloud'.

It all depends on what you set the generation time to. If you set the generation time to once every hour or two you would quickly see differences on a game server (for example if it were a multiplayer survival game) in only a few days.
Something like extinction could also happen relatively quick if players are just killing everything they see.

But what kind of affect would these changes have? Cosmetic, behavioral, statistical?

I've always wanted to see a game where mobs do that.

You have a valid concern, Biofag. Although many games have been tried that have the evolving mechanic, it is more dramatic than the real thing, where different genes are crafted by every single different life form in an ecosystem. The only problem is, this might bore an audience nowadays. Who knows, maybe the pet simulators like Nintendogs and Seaman will be revamped with a new engine that will make animals interact with each other, and will be massively profitable! It won't, but that does not mean it wouldn't be an interesting concept. If such an idea were to be properly implemented, and in a way that isn't very tedious, than it might be a nice addition to the casual video game player's desktop. Perhaps it sit in the background and run the program, slowly building genes for new animals. I could see it happening, after all store.steampowered.com/app/313340/ does exist, even if it's really pointless. The real tough part is going to be somehow making it much more fun than a simulated population ecosystem sounds like to your ordinary joe. I suggest you go to
>>>/agdg/ and pick up some pointers on programming, art and some sound design wouldn't hurt either. Go for it, OP!

I want to pet that shark.

I remember FF9 actually having a really complicated system in place to give the illusion of frogs repopulating naturally. it really only boils down to how long you have to wait between frog catching but it's weird they put so much effort into it.

In that kind of game it's just easier to assume that a single person is unable to make tigers extinct.

In games the only thing that matters is what the player can see. Unless you're playing a game about interstellar travel, it doesn't matter if there isn't a big flaming ball of gas illuminating the surface of the planet, only hat there's a nifty light source on top of the skybox.

Unless you're playing a game that is about large scale ecosystems, it doesn't need to have a robust natural selection system, it might even hinder the gameplay of another kinds of games. All you need is to have predatory shit happens while you can observe it, and it's enough to assume that an ecosystem exists but you're unable to largely impact it.

This would work.

Because our medium is occupied by parasites, duh.

The creatures games did this back in the 90s. Only the main 3 species had detailed genome, biochemistry, and nervous system simulation, but today you could easily implement something with the same per-creature level of and scale it to hundreds of individual creatures. They managed to run over 10 creatures in a world with decent performance on a single core 60mhz pentium and under 64mb of ram in 1996.

Natural selection frequently happened, with Creatures 3 and Docking Station (the "multiplayer" creature exchange standalone expansion) frequently converging on immortal creatures that reached sexual maturity nearly instantly after they were born.

The downfall of games in this genre would the same today as it was then:

At this point, you'll have a few hollowed-out communities crowing about being the "number one" fan site for a dead series. During all of this, the SJWs shriek about how people redistributing lost abandonware DLC for the original games is piracy and hurting the game despite nobody actually selling it.

Every once in a while, a few publishers might buy up the IP and try to make a new "hip" game based on it, but then they realize they have to satisfy both the casuals and the autist/SJW fanbase if they continue, and cancel the project.


Depends on the level of detail.


No, see my second paragraph about natural selection converging on solutions exploiting engine flaws for immortal creatures that begin breeding as soon as they are born.

Dude japs have so much bizarre autism. It is why they can be so amazing at certain things like technology, but then utterly dysfunctional at other stuff like the Sega Saturn mismanagement, FFXIII development hell, Fukushima accident, etc.

Can you go into more detail into the behind the scenes of the frog catching mini game? I have never heard this trivia before. The only other thing similar to this that I know of is that Kojima wanted his team to give Snake realistic facial hair growth in MGS4. His programmers begged him not to do it and he eventually dropped the idea.

Biofag here, can confirm that is more or less on the money. The source of a selection pressure for a trait does not matter. It can be human-induced by choice, inadvertent from environmental pollution or changes we make, or just natural such as weather patterns changing. The process of evolution will still happen, regardless of the source.
Breeding dogs is at a functional level not very different from them evolving on their own, we just apply much stronger selection pressures.

...

Isn't Subnautica supposed to have something like that when it comes out?

finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Frog_catching
FF9 is just really complicated in its programming compared to the other games in the series, but I think all this shit for a sidequest that no sane person would ever bother with is just ridiculous.

Dwarf Fortress is probably the closest you'll get to crazy shit happening on its own.

Disagree, this existed back in the 90s as well. Practically half way to dwarf fortress.

You may want to try out Simlife if you haven't already. It's complex and extremely poorly documented. I've been fiddling with it for a while now, and I have made some basic ecosystems, but none that utilize all or even most of what the game is capable of. See my frustrations below, I thought a bio major might be able to overcome them.


Something similar happens in Simlife where an "optimal" set of adaptations makes everything else fucking obsolete and it ruins the enjoyment of creating a diverse ecosystem.
Also
And some more:
All this bullshit makes it hard to create a cool world

Does the game have genomes containing a grammar to express rules at all? It's been a while since I've played it.

Bioware fag?
Bioshock fag?
Oh. Never mind.

Express rules? It has settings, if that's what you mean (you can change the energy requirements for moving/fighting/gestation, population caps, mutation rates, and many more).

If you mean "does the game have genetics" then yes, you can view an individual animal's genome and the frequency of variations in the entire population. Many times I have edited a single animal to fly/filter feed/whatever and watched it breed and spread the adaptation to the entire population.

That's not quite what I had in mind. Do individual compounds get simulated in the creature's biochemistry? ATP, glucose, etc.

The creatures games permit the genomes to define reactions such as "1 glucose -> 1 water, 1 atp, 1 c02" as part of the genome, allowing different metabolisms. Hypothetically, you could have a creature that ingests an item in the world that contains things otherwise toxic to the default creatures and instead get nutrition out of it. I'm pretty sure one of the paid DLCs they released had some creatures like that.

The downside of the mutable grammar is that triggers for aging are mutable as well, leading to immortality as mentioned in earlier posts.

Oh no, it's not that complex at all.

aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-alife/

How did I not know about this?

Can you expand a bit on your idea? It doesn't sound like fun gameplay.

Also what happened to Mewgenics? Was it scrapped?

yeah, edmund must milk binding of isaac some more

The lead for this game is making vid related.

Who thought that would be a good idea?

Eat shit you dumb faggot
speciesgame.com/

It would allow the player to have a real effect on the game world.
It would also make animals in videogames not feel like randomly placed announces.

Contact me at [email protected]/* */, I'm a game dev interested in your idea.

Okay, so do you mean just an ecology of flora/fauna being simulated in a game around the game, while not maybe having that much to do with actual gameplay but still something that lives and breathes on its own and what you can affect if you so deem?

Honestly, you can't win just have a game idea with what you said, you would have to hide it behind your real idea. These types of games would pick my fancy because of how shit could develop. If i where a game designer and i had to create a wildlife for the area. I would make a simulation, put in variables for each animal and possible variables it could get in future generations and make a very simple food chain shit. I would see how this would play out and stuff and after a couple of generations, i would use the creatures i had left over for the area.

Cool thread op

I remember reading something that stated 'immortality' (i.e. uninhibited growth and repair provided resources are available) is actually the default state for creatures and aging was something that developed later in (or was a side effect of) more complex organisms.

It doesn't have to be that taxing to run depending on how you do it.
Waku had a system that was supposed to simulate the habitat but from what I hear they don't use it much any more because players are retarded and kill everything without giving a shit about the ecosystem

You could simply do like no mans sky did with it's (pretty simple) random generation bullshit but keep tabs on what creatures live and die so that the population numbers change with it and make it so random things give different abilities (like long necks allowing things to reach plants or fur allowing a creator to live in temps colder).

If I were a dev I would try to make a game based around this. Something like sim city except with an ecosystem instead.
Really ecology is a lot like a videogame. It has natural systems to balance itself out but if things go too far in one direction or the other (too many predators, not enough predators, not enough water, ect) the entire system collapses and that could definitely work in a simulator game.

Diagnosis: Internalize Leftism.

It's not an intentional feature, more an oversight by the devs. Blame the company for not hiring sufficiently good QA.

I dunno, most stalker fags know

Does the game not implement conservation of mass and energy?

Even without conservation of energy, are there features to shake up the environment seasonally or with occasional disasters like volcanoes and meteorite strikes? Or the land changing to simulate plate tectonics to isolate populations?

I think the solution might to accept a dynamic world while dialing up maximum rate of time flow and decreasing mutation rate per generation (at least to start with, you could have mutability be a mutable factor as well if you aren't using a complex genome system).

That isn't a principle nor is it an actual thing in reality.

Isn't the disadvantage to assexaul is that genetic variety is much lower. That if any rapid change where to hit them, they would get fucked.

simlife was the shit man

But does it matter or are you just some Skyrim fag?

It does.

How? How can a simulated ecosystem benefit dragon age?

that shit was fucking cash.

...

Explain to me why energy is created when I drop a dildo on the ground.

You don't create energy.

Fuck off back to reddit if you love Bioware so much you fat fucking faggot.

see
Energy and mass aren't created or destroyed, but redistributed. You clearly either don't understand physics or are desperate to derail the thread, so I'm not going to bother explaining conservation of energy to you. But I will explain why implementing it in a game stops a ton of glitchy behavior from happening.

The point of implementing mass and energy tracking into the game is so that reactions and creature growth have costs. For example, if we give growth and reproduction energy costs, it's now impossible for the engine to evolve organisms that instantly age into fully reproductively capable and immortal adults.

Energy conservation and rate limiting mechanisms are needed as well so a species can't zero on things like transmuting every part of its mass into something flammable and then combust. Although that would be hilarious, it would also be retarded and your simulation would eventually be overrun by literal fire ants.

it provides penalties for camping in one specific area through depletion of the area, and forces the developers to put thought and effort into additional areas of the game. However, you don't need to put a detailed simulation in for an action RPG.

...

You really want to fuck one of these things?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are lolicon furs.

Computerfag here, you don't understand.

if we keep the scope of the simulation low enough, it can be kinda fun and viable.

The downside is that our simulated organisms won't be capable of spontaneously creating their own dank memes until we have much higher computing power than we have today.

fuck off, shill

Go shill your shit somewhere else
>>>Holla Forums

Where is the actual not propaganda games where I can has kikes like OP

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Ultima Online had an ecosystem and they didn't tell the players. In a short time span the entire playerbase slaughtered every creature in the game until no enemy units existed or until the devs added enemy spawn rates.

Do explain.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT I POSTED A GAME THAT IS ALMOST EXACTLY LIKE OP'S POST AND EVERYONE IGNORED ME

shiggy diggy smh famalam tbh

Then there's no point to do it at the moment

...

I shiggy your diggy that you don't actually shiggy these diggies.

My nigguhs.

...

You have redistribution cycles of every chemical element used in biochemistry, with nitrogen and carbon being usual bottlenecks to accumulation of biomass.
You also have the flow of energy from its forms of low entropy, with steep gradient of their concentration, to uniformly distributed rise of thermal energy as the last form possible.
Two diametrically different processes.

holy shit nice digits but you're still a faggot (checked)

...

I deliberately killed them when I played this game. Every time.

I meant that the idea was hot.
but yeah now that you mention it, I probably would

That "immortality" had usually as its counterpart asexual proliferation dividing the parent organism into its offspring organisms, effectively "killing" it as an individual in the process. Either way, it didn't preserve its individuality as the immortality from its common definition would do.

mfw


The games didn't simulate at that level of detail. Chemicals were numbered by id. Even today per-element simulation is probably going to be a computational drain.


C2 was broken on release. The community patched the genomes to fix one hour stupidity syndrome before the devs did. See for more about the downward spiral. I'm so sorry.


Here's your (You), now kys.

>mfw it'll never get made so it doesn't matter

Did it have real, 100% science-based dragons?

No.

What?

It was a game where you played in the neolithic time period, and every item in the game was either made from foraged materials or stuff harvested from animals.

What the fuck are you memeing about?

Some idiot on promised an MMO with "100% science-based dragons" a while back without any prior dev experience, and got some fanfare around it. It went exactly how you would expect it to.

Oh you can fuck right off back there, you kike obeying faggot. You don't belong here, and never fucking will.

...

Fuck off.

Spore literally had the devs split into two teams, with one side wanting to make a cutesy-casual game and sabotaging the other side who wanted to do a straight up simulator.

Sharks have skin like fucking sandpaper.

A lot of effort, a serious performance consideration, and almost no benefit to gameplay. You get better results for less work by faking it.

/thread
We're collectively retarded.

average_kickstater_pitch.mpp

christian fundies ruin everything

What I really wanted to do in creatures was to genetically modify Norms, maybe crossbreed them with Grendels to make strong yet merciful Grenderls up to breed.

If its just in the background there's always the issue of a glitch happening and causing exponential growth of one animal.
While the exponential animal in reality would be culled or die out, in the game they don't have any culling programs and could expand and expand until they crash the game

Granddroids, the game mentioned , might not be much better. The guy had a good concept in 96 but I don't think he can deliver as a solo dev. All the videos I've seen are pretty underwhelming, and despite everything CreatureLabs turned out becoming progressively worse as time went on, the fanbase still hangs off the dev's dick like they need the smegma to breathe. Bear in mind that I'm saying this as someone who loves the series.


Did you get the genome editors? Despite it being done to death by this point, you could probably take a crack at it. Just be aware that the game engine loves crashing.


Creatures stops eggs from developing once you hit an adjustable population cap.

Something I tried to do long time ago was importing Norms from different comunities with curious genetics just to let them breed with eachother and see if there was any new mutation.

there's cell lab for android, but that's more of an evolutionary puzzle game rather than an evolutionary simulator. it has the option for random mutations, but they never result in anything complex

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I came here to call you a stupid piece of shit

It was the artfags, it's ALWAYS the artfags. They wanted the monsters to be more cutesy and child friendly instead of realistic, scientific, and horrifying.

I just wanted to make tyranosaur dragon ogre jews evolving from different creatures in Spore and also have the challenge of making it a survival machine depending of the side and how their body structure was. In the end I just got the "collect all pieces" shit that made me hate the creature phase in spore.

...

Didn't the "cute" team ruin everything? That's what the Spore dev said.

Aubrey De Grey?

You know, that guy who played the hermit on Monty Python's Life of Brian.

I don't see christian anywhere in that

There are comet strikes, droughts, floods, plagues etc. but they do one of two things:
or
So adapting to them isn't what usually happens. Also auto disasters occur rarely


I thought the same thing at first, but they seem to mutate just fine anyway, and there are a duo of "genetic variety" and "mating difference" variables you can set that take care of it. Even if there is a small lack that I'm not aware of, it doesn't impact the overpowered nature of asexuality.

I'll play this, but what's there in alpha?

Wurm Unlimited does this

Complicated when it's too many animals.
Could work. subtle differences, not like No Man's Sky.

He means a stupid biology simulation and not an actual game.

keep forgetting about this

Neat.

Come on, read between the lines. When a good 70% of America is Christian, you're going to have a /christian/ on your dev team (if it's in the 100 people range) complaining about the depiction of religion in your project. Stop kidding yourself. If it wasn't a christian fundie, than Lord knows there's still a 2.8% chance that it's a Jewish (OY VEY) or a Mudslime (HALAL) person being offended by what outsider's perceive of their cults/tax havens.

Not sure how you could fit this into a game, but still pretty cool. Also:
Wow.

I see two ways to make this into a fun game in the traditional sense, but I admit that both are somewhat niche definitions of fun.

The first is a sandbox with scenario challenges, like Rollercoaster Tycoon. Creatures, from the purist goal-oriented problem solving standpoint that seems to be espousing, consistently provided either zero or half-assed gameplay in favor being keeping cute pets. If you keep the mechanics focused on the ecological aspect of the game instead of individual pets, you could build challenges around the ecological simulation. Examples would include ensuring the survival of a certain line of organisms for X years, or turning a desert into a rainforest with Y clades. Zeus: Master of Olympus and the Pharoah chained goals like these together into a form of episodic campaigns spread out between a main and colony cities, so there's no reason ecosystems couldn't receive the same treatment. I admit that all of these are still going to be a fairly niche games that will require autismo tinkerers like myself and to get the most enjoyment from.

The other route is making ecology part of the background landscape, as mentioned in and . Take EVE online as an example. There isn't a defined "win" condition for the game or universe as a whole. However, over shorter spans of time you can define victory states via military engagements, and over the longer term you know that you are doing better than some other group of people who have established themselves as your rivals. The same overall process might translate well to a hunting and gathering context like what outlined. Hell, the persistently hostile environment might serve as a buffer against SJWs too. Again, this will be a very specific niche, but it is possible to get fun out of it.

I'm kinda excited for this game. It's by Yasuhiro Wada, the designer behind Harvest Moon.

Holy shit, that beard is absorbing his life essence.

IT looks good,b ut to be honest I want to make my own creatures.

Why didn't they just kick out the incompetent devs who obviously weren't fit to design a game about a subject they nothing about?

That looks pretty hype. I wish it went into more detail how it's evolution system works though.

Only when you don't rub them the right way, but when you do? They get aroused.

I'd say with the current political climate it's the other way around, that the 2.8% you mentioned will be more likely to complain about anything due to mutually shared butthurt.

I wasnt the current year back then, try again.

Spore becoming cartoony had nothing to do with pressure from EA, it was internal pressure from other Maxis employees, see


t. somebody who actually owns and has read the artbooks

Let it fucking die already user.

For what purpose?

This game exists

Would you naturally select a xeno babe?

Natural processes are good models for games. It would save a lot of time in world design if approached correctly, and not cost any extra processing power if the large/medium scale models were implemented as static in the release.

e.g. Seven Cities of Gold modeled its map by starting with a random seed for plate tectonics, drawing the mountains, then the rivers as a downward stream towards the coast.

There are other factors you can implement - deserts form behind mountains that are blocking coastal winds. This was done in the Civ 5 map mode PerfectEarth3 along with the rivers going from mountains -> coast.

You can maintain other natural models too. Forests are generally in three stages going from most resilient and least biodiverse to the opposite, then a brushfire resets them. Your game world doesn't need to be procedurally generated to follow these models, you can just set conditions where certain creatures appear in one of the three stages, and choose yourself which forests should be at what stage. Likewise with the multitude of natural biomes. Complex models like climate and weather can be easily simplified in this way - maintain temperature to a random seed with different areas trending towards certain extremes, maintain a simple, random water cycle that decides when and how hard it rains; temp decides if the rain turns into snow, or ice.

It gets more complicated (and more relevant to the player experience) at the human scale. The emphasis on things like animal food cycles (for a human timescale) is misguided, imo, at best it serves a novelty. I'm starting work on a first person RPG similar to TES, and with the emphasis on this kind of algorithmic structure, it's clear the economy is the core of the game as its where all other complex game goals derive. Architecture and landscape is the second most important thing, as it guides the aspect of travel in the player experience - for the medieval cities/villages, I think it's easy enough to mine Christopher Alexander's work in pattern language for models to follow. What I hope to demonstrate is an alternative to the current TES approach to its world design - fantasy can be open and free flowing in the guise of space games like Elite 2 and expansive, complex games can be easily and (relatively) quickly made through the use of efficient algorithms in its design. The design approach, if successful, could easily be translated to modern dungeon crawlers or those indie survival games.

...

I would add, considering a fantasy worlds monster food/economic cycle is an interesting discussion. How do ogres co-exist with humans for example? Say you treat them like wolves & sheep, periodically coming from the mountains to steal livestock Thus, excluding wild ogres living far away from humans, ogres would be found near agricultural villages of a certain size - neither too small to not sustain his diet, nor too big that they could organize a party to kill the ogre. What causes a village to hunt the ogre rather than ignore it as a nuisance of life? The town being put in dire economic conditions, no longer able to allow the lost sheep? The ogre overstepping itself and stealing a child? And perhaps with certain conditions, they might organize into a more intimidating group that would be able to survive amongst a medium sized town. Would it be due to them having other wild food sources to maintain their strength without risking themselves in the village, or the opposite, growing tough through desperation?

The other question is if this is something necessarily worth modeling in-game. Would conditions really change fast enough for any player to witness these variables? Unless you forced it with some hamfisted Fable-style quests to show the change - or incentivized the player to manipulate the environment for the sake of forcing those changes, like when you might to profit in GTA's stock market - they wouldn't notice it any more if they were not simply models that the designer followed when he put together the world. Either way, the player will know where to look to find ogres, and the special case of a party of ogres, whether it came from a real feedback loop or a faked one, would still come to his attention.

Holla Forums fucking up long posts?

1. Spore before EA decided to completely reboot the game and target it at kids first.
2. Shores of Hazeron is everything people thought No Man's Sky was going to be (despite NMS itself never claiming to be any of it) and more, though it has nothing to do with the shit you seem to be talking about
3. Go volunteer to the Thrive development team and fucking make the game you want, you lazy faggot.

Nigger it's the Stone Age, how you gonna horde?

It's not another open world survival multiplayer game, user, you don't go around building bases wherever you want. You won't be able to just build endless walls to separate players from resources. You have a hut in a village, and you have to maintain it and build everything that goes into it and that you use and wear which is where you get you missions.

Are you implying that wolves are ignored as nuisances of life and not hunted and killed ? Every single sheep is valuable to a farmer.

that's too much effort for something that you will look for 1 second and get bored

So are you, yet your parent still raised you.