Simulating disruptive ecological events such as droughts, climate change, ice ages, disasters, etc. might help periodically food-rich regions to evolve builds that can survive harsher but more stable conditions. It might even be reasonable to use it as a way to keep your sim from crashing; ie: focus disasters on areas with high pop density.
Could even be explained by the argument that "if a tree falls and you don't hear it, has it fallen?". So if an event doesn't hit population dense areas, was there an event at all?
I like the climate change idea! A way to scale the intensity of the seasons(maybe an average yearly temperature) would allow the simulation to model larger climate trends, ice ages and whatnot.
Factually one of, and personally the best evolutionary ecosystem simulator. The impacts of seasons, even when they only impact tiles, is just one example of how you continue to consistently amaze me with new additions & improvements. Amazing stuff.
I think using temperature to strictly limit plant growth is the wrong way to implement things. Just because an area is warmer or colder doesn’t change plant growth, it mostly effects which plants grow there. A warm climate might have dense rainforest while a colder climate still has a dense taiga. The lower temperature does not mean less plant life until you get to an extreme where plants really can’t grow at all. In your simulation it appears that there is essentially only one kind of plant life (leaves, grass, etc. but all universally effected by temperature in the exact same way) so having it fluctuate with temperature is going to negatively impact your sim, you should either dampen the effect that temperature has on reducing available food in temperate areas or add a second type of plant that prefers the middle latitudes to maintain a more standard food availability and also allow for additional complexity in the species by diversifying their plant food source preferences
Does the temperature only effect food? Or does it also increase the required intake of animals? So its colder->need more food to keep warm? Can creatures die just because its cold? Because bigger animals are more effective in cold weathers. And smaller ones are better in warm Environments. Because your surface/Volume get smaller the bigger you are.
With the temperature changes you could have so water bodies freeze over allowing species to temporarily traverse them. Perhaps some way to evolve more unique traits like eusociallity, burrowing, and flight. Also some more diverse food options like carrion, ants, eggs, and honey. I've said this in other comments but what you're making is incredible. I'm trying to get into coding and I have no idea how you accomplished this.
Thanks for the comment! I am hoping to add all of these things over time though I have to admit I hadn’t thought of using ice in that way following the temp changes. Really cool idea!
Could the change in weather create land bridges? I.e, two areas are disconnected, but if it gets too hot some water might evaporate, or too cold it might freeze, allowing for temporary passage between islands?
I've loved this evolutionary journey so far, and really look forwards to catching every vid as they drop next year too. Here's to many more years of this content 🎉
First of all congratulations. This is one of the most captivating evolution simulations I've come across on youtube and it is beautifully done. Now, I realize suggestions for future improvements are plenty, but I was thinking that the avatar system might not be the best one to appreciate visually the diversity of each creature's stats and especially the continuities between related populations. Even though it requires sacrificing realistic depictions, attributing a single phenotypal characteristic expressed on a continuous scale to any given genetic parameter could be more helpful. For example the way stealth worked in the previous video allowed an immediate assessment of which populations invested in that parameter and which didn't, and it also allowed to guess the origin of a migratory population: if a new area suddenly showed translucent warthogs one could immediately conclude that they likely migrated from the population to the east which was more stealthy rather than the one to the west which was less stealthy. Similarly, just to make another example, creatures could come in two main colours based on speed with gradated variations in between two extremes, say red for slow and blue for fast (something similar to what Primer did in some of his earliest videos ruclips.net/video/0ZGbIKd0XrM/видео.html&ab_channel=Primer). The current system is aesthetically more appealing, but for example when a new population B arises from an older population A their respective appearances hardly allow to recognize their genetic connection and the graduality of this differentiation, as the system that assigns the avatars operates discrete classifications. Continuous visual characteristics could do the trick better when it comes to tracing relatedness and appreciating gradual changes over time.
Hi! Thanks for the detailed feedback! Yeah I am thinking of some ways of getting the visuals to be more “informative”. stealth and size are easy ones but, like you say, it would be cold to have others too. At the moment I am thinking about outlines which change colour based on certain stats, icons, etc. I like the idea of avatars just because I like using real animals, so the trick is finding something that works in conjunction with that. I think the other thing to bear in mind is that (hopefully) as more avatars are added, they themselves will allow the tracking of movements and traits. If, for example, we had 1000 creatures to pick from, even minor variations would result in different avatars, etc. Thanks again for the comment!
Super exciting! So now I have no idea how this would work (since you've only had static landmasses) but it would be super cool to continental drift occur. Do you have any plan of this in the future? Again thanks for the wonderful videos!
Yeah I have a (lofty ideal) to implement this, but it would be quite far in the future I think as it would need to build in with mountains and water etc.!
I would really love to see you add a gene that controls mutation rate. Especially as you create a more volatile ecosystem it would be interesting to see what populations evolve to tightly regulate their genes and which don’t.
It’s in the plan. One of the first things I am going to do in 2024 is completely rewrite the code for stats and mutations to make it far more flexible, which should allow all kinds of new and interesting stats!
you know it was really interesting to see that there was a repeating migration happening from the center of the map to the South-East corner of the map before dying off. looking forward to creatures being directly affected by Temperature that's gonna be interesting. anyway until then happy Christmas and New Year.
I love the content youve been putting out and I can't wait to see what you accomplish next year! From a data visualisation point - it'd be interesting to see meat split into active predation and scavenging. I'd love to know who is out there actively hunting and who is just eating whatever they come across on the ground.
This is really cool I hope that you can add adaptations for creatures in relation to the environment, and add some kind of a plant that can grow in colder temps maybe make it grow slower as a way to balance the simulation
@@EightLittleBearsYou could include a plant evolution thing, with temperature regulation, a 'fruiting' ability (eaten by a creature with X stats, get spread for a growth boost in tiles based on creature's speed), and other variables. That way you arent just designating areas as the "poor resource zone" or creating functionally identical zones with different colored plants
Yeah it is something I have been thinking about. The thing is that it’s basically a trade-off: - procedural sprites offer a better of what’s going on, and is generally the easier option since you don’t need to hand-draw every creature. - plain sprites offer higher quality art (because you can hand-draw shapes and lighting, etc.) and real creatures. I think I will end up doing both in the end.. haha
Thermoregulatory adaptations, like Crassulacean acid metabolism, gigantothermy, insulation, and blood radiators (elephant/jerboa ears, etc), would really help emphasize the impact of seasons, and could allow for dynamic biomes in response to a global temperature change if you get the plant code efficient enough. You’d need to model that investment in increasing the efficient digestion and consumption of plants is likely to exclude predatory meat eating, and vice versa, to get trends comparable to historical- otherwise I think we might get Wooly Badgers, rather than Wooly Mammoths.
Maybe have some creatures protect their young by having the young follow them?as a behaviour trait maybe?This will also come with the liability of finding food for the young or maybe the parent could make milk to feed the young by using its own energy?
I think the world is not large enough to support a bigger diversity right now because any creature can just randomly walk in other regions and outcompete what ever lives their. and the simulation is not quite right just now even though the equatorial regions of a planet like earth are stable they are way to hot for most creatures and plants or have a extreme abundance of animals and plants because the temperature is stable but the moisture is not wich theirby causes the climate to be unstable as well because it is just a combination of both factors. But even then it is unstable not in time but in differing location because of wind and mountain ranges trapping mousture in some parts while keeping it away from others. The most overall stable regions are in between the equator and both poles. Wich isn't that obvious on planet earth because most of the space in between the equator and the south pole is ocean andthe only bigger landmasses like south america, australia, and most south africa happen to have mountain ranges on the wrong side of the continent by complete chance.
Resources can deplete but this doesn’t (yet) have a lasting impact on the land itself (e.g. like you would get from re-farming the same crop every season on the same land).
i have two ideas to why its failing the plants cant evolve and thereby there isnt any plant that survives well the south or north or second not enough mutation/group ok first groupbecause lets say 1 out 100 gets a mutation letting it survive with less food but you only 50 then the chance is low but out of a thousand the chance is much higher or the interval is too small as with mutation 1 out of 100 gets the mutation then make a bigger chance like 10 out of a 100 gets the mutation
If you mean when will I have a basic playable version, I am hoping late next year. If you mean when will it be fully complete and I will not longer be working on it…. Maybe when we are all living in the simulation 😀
The seasonal cycle is waay too "seasonally" extreme, like the poles literally disappear and become 25% of the world just a few dozen ticks later, but it was intentional, so i accept it. Some global warming simulation would be cool!(at least to prevent your computer to crash from a creature population explosion)
Love you’re videos i have been watching since 1k subs❤ I have an interesting idea: add intelligence (brain) they can find ( things ) and if they’re smart enough they can use it example: they find a cave if they’re smart enough they enter it and get protection for some turn and more also this can implement the ability to swim if they’re smart enough or hide on trees many more thing’s its complicated to make so it probably will take some time to balance it but yeah GL with making intelligence
This is the most fascinating nature/evolution simulation I have found on RUclips thus far. How do you simulate reproduction? Can anything mate with anything? Do you separate species? Or have you made the (reasonable) abstraction of a-sexual reproduction?
Thanks! Every creature has a “genome” which is essentially just a 61 character string. Every time there is a mutation, a random character in the string changes. Creature can mate with something as long as the string is ~95% similar (I.e. within 3 mutations of each other)
@@EightLittleBears Interesting, so your phenotype is basically independent from your genotype? This will lead to a lot of convergent evolution, where multiple species develop the same traits independently. I wonder if you would get more stable species and more robust populations, if you would link genotype and phenotype. For example by concatenating all your attributes into one long string and have that as your genome.
Hi! Unity game engine (using C#) is the main tool. I draw all the creatures and stuff on an iPad using Procreate. For the charts in this video I just used regular spreadsheet software but in some of my other videos with moving line charts I use a chart-maker I built (again with Unity).
Suggestion: Group them into packs, when the numbers exceed orders of magnitude. That should allow You to keep the simulation going if it climbs to higher numbers. For a bonus: Have a 'Herd' as next order of grouping. Great video!
Maybe add the ability to swim? Currently islands are completely disconnected from the remaining part of the map. Creatures should be able to move onto the water and the mainland. And fish are currently non-existent. Excited to see what version 1 and 2024 will have in store for us and you!
My first time watching one of your videos, and simulations. So got some ideas for next year. It sounds like you set it that coldness only effects plant growth. However, even in the most coldest places, there are still forests and animals. This is became a 'Tree', is not just a 'Tree', but like humans an animals, has different traits, effects, dna, ect, ect~. So even in the Tundras of the north and south, there should still be plenty of forests. Just a different kinda forest, with different trees designed to grow in the cold instead of just the heat. And being a different tree/plants, it could require a different kinda animal to eat it. One that is more adapt to the cold, but less to the heat. So eating it could effect the animal, making it more comfortable in the cold, and not like the heat as much anymore. This could cause 'Herb' like animals to split off into different zones they like or dislike, some in the middle where it's warm, while others in the cold cause they like the cold better. And having less food in the cold, they could digest food slower, and need less of it to get full. But, the effect only effects the Herb, so Predators can still roam the map to eat the animals without getting trapped in specific biomes cause of who they eat. ^ Just an idea to throw out there.
Your side note about carnivorous pandas actually is pretty funny, given pandas are the PeTA of the animal kingdom - Natural carnivores that picked up a diet of bamboo for some dumb reason.
Make things get hungrier in hoter/colder temps?, give the ability to swim but it costs more food? link East and West side of maps?, meat gives more food then plant?, add disease that culls large clusters to help stop population explosions?
Maybe you could incorporate the fact that different food sources have different effort/reward values, cows have to spend their whole day eating, but tigers need to catch only one animal per week for example. meat has a higher nutritional value but is risky to acquire while herbivores take a safe but time intensive route. Also it would be very cool if you could get the predator prey population curves to naturally evolve.
To keep from overpopulation crashing the computer, and the focus of animals driving towards one working build in a stable region, give plants a means to defend themselves. In our world plants will develop waxy surfaces, thorns, toxins, bright colors, odors, and more to attract a specific species or repel other species. Giving the plants a way to evolve might result in even stable climates to be more unstable and drive change in the animals... when the living plant is sometimes hostile, focusing on meat or dead/decaying plants may be the better option. Maybe plants in colder environments grow slower but develop richer nutrients or some way to preserve resources through the cold. Our real world does that with plants creating dense seed clusters or fruit to give offspring a boost to survive the temperature swing, and some plants develop ways to go dorment to survive winters. There are also other plants that develop some means such as flowers or odors to attract animals to help spread seeds. I guess what I'm saying is maybe the next step is to introduce evolution into the plants.
Unsure if someone has asked before but have you made your code open source or (understandably) have you kept it private? I'd love to have a look at it and run some simulations myself. If you do have a private repo I completely understand, and I'm excited to see what comes next. I really enjoy your videos on this!
Hi! At the moment it’s private as I am considering turning it into a commercial game, but I was considering doing a tutorial on setting up a basic simulation for the community to build on, if that sounds interesting?
Amazing video series! Idk if you already implemented it, but I think you should include at least two more factors for animals, rest periods (aka how long do they sleep) where they can spend a round or more sleeping and conserve energy a lot of carnivores sleep most of their day, it would also help animals in colder regions as they can eat less and sleep more and the ability to gain stores of food, aka that they not only eat when hungry but to have more fat on them maybe an expansion to their hunger and the ability to move their food priority upwards. Additionally idk if you did that already but meat should give more calories than plant matter, mainyl because it takes less energy to digest and is directly helpful, but also because unlike the plants we eat most herbavores eat plants that are not very nurishing like grass, especailly when you substract the energy needed to digest the food meat is a much bigger plus. So maybe adjust the calories given by each food source too and see what happens it should lead to much more diversity in strategy (if you didnt do it already)
This video : Gives a whole new perspective to that phrase in the holy books the final generation ! Think about it a training model for souls . The final generation being giving a light body and moved to heaven ? We are inside grand theft auto 911 !
I don't wish to nitpick but since it's a simulation I thought it important to bring up the fact that tho we tend to think of herbivores as strictly vegetarian, that's simply not true, deer, sheep and cows etc have been known to eat meat like birds, snakes and even suck on bones to get important nutrients, so a 0.0 calculation I would say is inaccurate.
To allow the cold zones to support life couldn’t the animals have some sort of sense that winter is coming and then have the opportunity to hibernate or migrate? I’d feel that would allow for the species to adapt to the harsher environments.
Just a pedantic nit pick… but when the earth is tilted in the winter and summer it’s not a different amount of sun hitting the earth. It’s that it’s the same amount, spread over a larger area. Has nothing to do with the actual video though so feel free to ignore me lol
If you want to simulate evolution better you could have some plants better for the cold and allow over time plants to slowly mutate to better fit there environment, aswell you could have some animals that are better suited for different temperatures allowing for the north and south not being empty as there are penguins in real life
Is dam good. My suggest for making more diverse and Endurance world Is add the insect. Insect have tò use a very small quanity of food, High ratio of re production and small dimension. This probably bring a lot of omnivora feed only of that and left tò the real carnivori the task of hunting big erbivors. That probably can be a help for the simulation for sustain itself in Life. This Is the best advice i find ti suggest you. Season Is ok
Very few evolution simulators impliment plant evolution, which is very important. Anti-nutritive compounds, in particular, drive a huge amount of specialization in herbivores and make omnivory or predation more viable .
Definitely a good idea, but it seems like it needs some fine-tuning. The entire simulation was pretty samey. Still cannot wait for very rare, but major geography changes in landmass!
I noticed that you use hexagonal tiles, but the world overall is a rectangle. Have you considered switching to a hexagonal world? It would also be closer to our real planet where the equatorial latitude is biggest, whereas this simulation has equal space at every latitude.
Yeah it is something I am considering. The nice thing about a square is that you can use a regular coordinate system. Not a big deal really, but pretty convenient ha
You should consider making seasonal periods much longer to allow creatures to both settle there and leave there as migratory creatures. Excellent work though!
soomething that may help with more migration, to access bigger parts of the map (and help in extreme environments): depending on perception value a creature can also see tiles that are further away and choose to go there if it makes caloric sense.
I like the idea about perception. One thing I was thinking about was separating it out into different types, so sight would be short range but very precise, smell would (potentially) be more long range but less precise, etc.
In real life, many if not most animals in temperate/boreal climates hibernate, or at least reduce their activity levels during winter as a direct response to lower food accessability.
Yeah, this is something I want to implement. Planning to do it alongside some sort of reptile update since cold/warm bloodedness is an interesting concept in itself, and there’s probably a lot of code that can be shared between that and hibernation!
Is this evolution or ecosystem simulation? I haven't watched the other videos but it seems odd that you'd have to modify the variables so less creatures die from age which results in everyone dying instead of increasing/making a proper reproduction system allowing for a new generation of creatures by the time the previous all die. Just an observation, correct me if I'm wrong!
It’s both I guess. There is a reproduction system, but for this particular version of the sim the environments were pretty volatile so I just tweaked some of the base settings to compensate. It’s a work in progress 😃
@@EightLittleBears Looking forward to the next videos regardless! I assume you have done research on predator-prey differential equations? (Lotka-Volterra equations, predator-prey model, etc)
Yeah I agree - I am looking into some solutions to this (maybe some form of outline) which changes with a particular stat, but I think part of the problem for this particular sim was that we genuinely just had very similar builds..
multithreading or multiprocessing.... bigger map with more resources and maybe a reduction in precision to make it work better like only tracking things to three decimal points so it runs better. dynamic events like asteroid strikes. More in depth evolution with dynamically generated images using dalle-3 or something you could feed in a json of the different qualities about a creature and get it to make an image for you of a 8 armed sloth with 2 mouths. Also having winter seasons vary in temp on a 23000 year cycle like they do irl would be pretty cool. and maybe having the 12 year solar cycle could be cool too
Simulating disruptive ecological events such as droughts, climate change, ice ages, disasters, etc. might help periodically food-rich regions to evolve builds that can survive harsher but more stable conditions. It might even be reasonable to use it as a way to keep your sim from crashing; ie: focus disasters on areas with high pop density.
That’s an interesting thought! Combat PC shortcomings with…killing 😂
Oooo this would be cool
I believe that's how you start a religion.
Could even be explained by the argument that "if a tree falls and you don't hear it, has it fallen?". So if an event doesn't hit population dense areas, was there an event at all?
I like the climate change idea! A way to scale the intensity of the seasons(maybe an average yearly temperature) would allow the simulation to model larger climate trends, ice ages and whatnot.
Factually one of, and personally the best evolutionary ecosystem simulator. The impacts of seasons, even when they only impact tiles, is just one example of how you continue to consistently amaze me with new additions & improvements. Amazing stuff.
Glad you liked it!
really happy i stubled across this, this is awesome!
Thanks!
Fell asleep to this last night, not a critique I'm actually restarting today cus this was interesting
Thanks for the videos. This type of work is fascinating.
Thanks so much!! Btw you are my first super thanks 😊
This couls evolve into a mod for dwarf fortress
I think using temperature to strictly limit plant growth is the wrong way to implement things. Just because an area is warmer or colder doesn’t change plant growth, it mostly effects which plants grow there. A warm climate might have dense rainforest while a colder climate still has a dense taiga. The lower temperature does not mean less plant life until you get to an extreme where plants really can’t grow at all. In your simulation it appears that there is essentially only one kind of plant life (leaves, grass, etc. but all universally effected by temperature in the exact same way) so having it fluctuate with temperature is going to negatively impact your sim, you should either dampen the effect that temperature has on reducing available food in temperate areas or add a second type of plant that prefers the middle latitudes to maintain a more standard food availability and also allow for additional complexity in the species by diversifying their plant food source preferences
why did you private the video the first few minutes after it released?
Hi! It’s not private. Got hit with a copyright claim for background music that was supposed to be safe. So I had to reupholster with different music 😢
thank you for info :D Its so difficult when things like that heppen I feel you!
Does the temperature only effect food? Or does it also increase the required intake of animals? So its colder->need more food to keep warm?
Can creatures die just because its cold? Because bigger animals are more effective in cold weathers. And smaller ones are better in warm Environments. Because your surface/Volume get smaller the bigger you are.
It doesn’t affect animals yet, but that’s in the plan for future updates!
With the temperature changes you could have so water bodies freeze over allowing species to temporarily traverse them. Perhaps some way to evolve more unique traits like eusociallity, burrowing, and flight. Also some more diverse food options like carrion, ants, eggs, and honey. I've said this in other comments but what you're making is incredible. I'm trying to get into coding and I have no idea how you accomplished this.
Thanks for the comment! I am hoping to add all of these things over time though I have to admit I hadn’t thought of using ice in that way following the temp changes. Really cool idea!
It’s amazing how many times I watch someone recreate Maxis’ SimLife and am fascinated each time because I always wanted a better/updated version.
Glad you like it!
Could the change in weather create land bridges? I.e, two areas are disconnected, but if it gets too hot some water might evaporate, or too cold it might freeze, allowing for temporary passage between islands?
this is such a underrated channel. keep up the good work
Thanks so much!
agreed!
I've loved this evolutionary journey so far, and really look forwards to catching every vid as they drop next year too. Here's to many more years of this content 🎉
First of all congratulations. This is one of the most captivating evolution simulations I've come across on youtube and it is beautifully done. Now, I realize suggestions for future improvements are plenty, but I was thinking that the avatar system might not be the best one to appreciate visually the diversity of each creature's stats and especially the continuities between related populations. Even though it requires sacrificing realistic depictions, attributing a single phenotypal characteristic expressed on a continuous scale to any given genetic parameter could be more helpful. For example the way stealth worked in the previous video allowed an immediate assessment of which populations invested in that parameter and which didn't, and it also allowed to guess the origin of a migratory population: if a new area suddenly showed translucent warthogs one could immediately conclude that they likely migrated from the population to the east which was more stealthy rather than the one to the west which was less stealthy. Similarly, just to make another example, creatures could come in two main colours based on speed with gradated variations in between two extremes, say red for slow and blue for fast (something similar to what Primer did in some of his earliest videos ruclips.net/video/0ZGbIKd0XrM/видео.html&ab_channel=Primer). The current system is aesthetically more appealing, but for example when a new population B arises from an older population A their respective appearances hardly allow to recognize their genetic connection and the graduality of this differentiation, as the system that assigns the avatars operates discrete classifications. Continuous visual characteristics could do the trick better when it comes to tracing relatedness and appreciating gradual changes over time.
Hi! Thanks for the detailed feedback! Yeah I am thinking of some ways of getting the visuals to be more “informative”. stealth and size are easy ones but, like you say, it would be cold to have others too. At the moment I am thinking about outlines which change colour based on certain stats, icons, etc. I like the idea of avatars just because I like using real animals, so the trick is finding something that works in conjunction with that.
I think the other thing to bear in mind is that (hopefully) as more avatars are added, they themselves will allow the tracking of movements and traits. If, for example, we had 1000 creatures to pick from, even minor variations would result in different avatars, etc.
Thanks again for the comment!
Super exciting! So now I have no idea how this would work (since you've only had static landmasses) but it would be super cool to continental drift occur. Do you have any plan of this in the future? Again thanks for the wonderful videos!
Yeah I have a (lofty ideal) to implement this, but it would be quite far in the future I think as it would need to build in with mountains and water etc.!
I would really love to see you add a gene that controls mutation rate. Especially as you create a more volatile ecosystem it would be interesting to see what populations evolve to tightly regulate their genes and which don’t.
It’s in the plan. One of the first things I am going to do in 2024 is completely rewrite the code for stats and mutations to make it far more flexible, which should allow all kinds of new and interesting stats!
you know it was really interesting to see that there was a repeating migration happening from the center of the map to the South-East corner of the map before dying off.
looking forward to creatures being directly affected by Temperature that's gonna be interesting.
anyway until then happy Christmas and New Year.
Yeah that was pretty cool! And happy holidays to you too!
I love the content youve been putting out and I can't wait to see what you accomplish next year!
From a data visualisation point - it'd be interesting to see meat split into active predation and scavenging. I'd love to know who is out there actively hunting and who is just eating whatever they come across on the ground.
That’s an interesting idea!
This is really cool I hope that you can add adaptations for creatures in relation to the environment, and add some kind of a plant that can grow in colder temps maybe make it grow slower as a way to balance the simulation
Yeah looking into this (and thermal regulation in animals), not sure when that will be finished though!
@@EightLittleBearsYou could include a plant evolution thing, with temperature regulation, a 'fruiting' ability (eaten by a creature with X stats, get spread for a growth boost in tiles based on creature's speed), and other variables.
That way you arent just designating areas as the "poor resource zone" or creating functionally identical zones with different colored plants
In the future do you think you'll ever consider procedural sprites?
Yeah it is something I have been thinking about. The thing is that it’s basically a trade-off:
- procedural sprites offer a better of what’s going on, and is generally the easier option since you don’t need to hand-draw every creature.
- plain sprites offer higher quality art (because you can hand-draw shapes and lighting, etc.) and real creatures.
I think I will end up doing both in the end.. haha
@@EightLittleBears Have you ever looked at The Bibites?
Thermoregulatory adaptations, like Crassulacean acid metabolism, gigantothermy, insulation, and blood radiators (elephant/jerboa ears, etc), would really help emphasize the impact of seasons, and could allow for dynamic biomes in response to a global temperature change if you get the plant code efficient enough. You’d need to model that investment in increasing the efficient digestion and consumption of plants is likely to exclude predatory meat eating, and vice versa, to get trends comparable to historical- otherwise I think we might get Wooly Badgers, rather than Wooly Mammoths.
Maybe have some creatures protect their young by having the young follow them?as a behaviour trait maybe?This will also come with the liability of finding food for the young or maybe the parent could make milk to feed the young by using its own energy?
I think the world is not large enough to support a bigger diversity right now because any creature can just randomly walk in other regions and outcompete what ever lives their.
and the simulation is not quite right just now even though the equatorial regions of a planet like earth are stable they are way to hot for most creatures and plants or have a extreme abundance of animals and plants
because the temperature is stable but the moisture is not wich theirby causes the climate to be unstable as well because it is just a combination of both factors.
But even then it is unstable not in time but in differing location because of wind and mountain ranges trapping mousture in some parts while keeping it away from others.
The most overall stable regions are in between the equator and both poles. Wich isn't that obvious on planet earth because most of the space in between the equator and the south pole is ocean andthe only bigger landmasses like south america, australia, and most south africa happen to have mountain ranges on the wrong side of the continent by complete chance.
You're doing a great job, fantastic video! Locking forward to the next one!
Thank you so much!
does this simulate resource depletion? if so, do the places that are consistently depleted take longer to replenish?
Resources can deplete but this doesn’t (yet) have a lasting impact on the land itself (e.g. like you would get from re-farming the same crop every season on the same land).
i have two ideas to why its failing the plants cant evolve and thereby there isnt any plant that survives well the south or north or second not enough mutation/group ok first groupbecause lets say 1 out 100 gets a mutation letting it survive with less food but you only 50 then the chance is low but out of a thousand the chance is much higher or the interval is too small as with mutation 1 out of 100 gets the mutation then make a bigger chance like 10 out of a 100 gets the mutation
Here's something to take into account, sleep. Some creatures will have to sprend most of the day doing nothing
You should also add a stat that influences how many children they get in one pregnancy
Love this series :) Keep it up, it is facinating.
I can't wait to see how the simulation evolves next year! Do you have an estimate of when you think it could be ready?
If you mean when will I have a basic playable version, I am hoping late next year. If you mean when will it be fully complete and I will not longer be working on it…. Maybe when we are all living in the simulation 😀
The seasonal cycle is waay too "seasonally" extreme, like the poles literally disappear and become 25% of the world just a few dozen ticks later, but it was intentional, so i accept it.
Some global warming simulation would be cool!(at least to prevent your computer to crash from a creature population explosion)
Haha yeah it’s a bit tricky balancing the speed of the simulation. Evolution is obvs happen even more “too fast” but that’s the fun I guess 😃
Love you’re videos i have been watching since 1k subs❤ I have an interesting idea: add intelligence (brain) they can find ( things ) and if they’re smart enough they can use it example: they find a cave if they’re smart enough they enter it and get protection for some turn and more also this can implement the ability to swim if they’re smart enough or hide on trees many more thing’s its complicated to make so it probably will take some time to balance it but yeah GL with making intelligence
Thanks! Yeah intelligence is on my list for next year and hoping to implement some of the behaviours you’ve mentioned!
This is such a cool program, will it be available once you "finish" it?
Maybe you should add bad or good recessive genes and diseases
This is the most fascinating nature/evolution simulation I have found on RUclips thus far.
How do you simulate reproduction? Can anything mate with anything? Do you separate species? Or have you made the (reasonable) abstraction of a-sexual reproduction?
Thanks! Every creature has a “genome” which is essentially just a 61 character string. Every time there is a mutation, a random character in the string changes. Creature can mate with something as long as the string is ~95% similar (I.e. within 3 mutations of each other)
@@EightLittleBears Interesting, so your phenotype is basically independent from your genotype? This will lead to a lot of convergent evolution, where multiple species develop the same traits independently.
I wonder if you would get more stable species and more robust populations, if you would link genotype and phenotype. For example by concatenating all your attributes into one long string and have that as your genome.
Watching these is always fun lol
It's nice to see that predation seemed more balanced in this
Hi, I just found this project and I love it! I’m just curious what tools you used to build the visual simulation?
Hi! Unity game engine (using C#) is the main tool. I draw all the creatures and stuff on an iPad using Procreate. For the charts in this video I just used regular spreadsheet software but in some of my other videos with moving line charts I use a chart-maker I built (again with Unity).
He actualy did it lets go
Glad to see the vid back up!
Suggestion: Group them into packs, when the numbers exceed orders of magnitude. That should allow You to keep the simulation going if it climbs to higher numbers.
For a bonus: Have a 'Herd' as next order of grouping.
Great video!
Add birds and reptiles
Yay!! More content!!
Maybe add the ability to swim? Currently islands are completely disconnected from the remaining part of the map. Creatures should be able to move onto the water and the mainland. And fish are currently non-existent. Excited to see what version 1 and 2024 will have in store for us and you!
My first time watching one of your videos, and simulations. So got some ideas for next year. It sounds like you set it that coldness only effects plant growth. However, even in the most coldest places, there are still forests and animals. This is became a 'Tree', is not just a 'Tree', but like humans an animals, has different traits, effects, dna, ect, ect~. So even in the Tundras of the north and south, there should still be plenty of forests. Just a different kinda forest, with different trees designed to grow in the cold instead of just the heat.
And being a different tree/plants, it could require a different kinda animal to eat it. One that is more adapt to the cold, but less to the heat. So eating it could effect the animal, making it more comfortable in the cold, and not like the heat as much anymore. This could cause 'Herb' like animals to split off into different zones they like or dislike, some in the middle where it's warm, while others in the cold cause they like the cold better. And having less food in the cold, they could digest food slower, and need less of it to get full.
But, the effect only effects the Herb, so Predators can still roam the map to eat the animals without getting trapped in specific biomes cause of who they eat.
^ Just an idea to throw out there.
Your side note about carnivorous pandas actually is pretty funny, given pandas are the PeTA of the animal kingdom - Natural carnivores that picked up a diet of bamboo for some dumb reason.
Make things get hungrier in hoter/colder temps?, give the ability to swim but it costs more food? link East and West side of maps?, meat gives more food then plant?, add disease that culls large clusters to help stop population explosions?
Maybe you could incorporate the fact that different food sources have different effort/reward values, cows have to spend their whole day eating, but tigers need to catch only one animal per week for example. meat has a higher nutritional value but is risky to acquire while herbivores take a safe but time intensive route.
Also it would be very cool if you could get the predator prey population curves to naturally evolve.
To keep from overpopulation crashing the computer, and the focus of animals driving towards one working build in a stable region, give plants a means to defend themselves.
In our world plants will develop waxy surfaces, thorns, toxins, bright colors, odors, and more to attract a specific species or repel other species. Giving the plants a way to evolve might result in even stable climates to be more unstable and drive change in the animals... when the living plant is sometimes hostile, focusing on meat or dead/decaying plants may be the better option.
Maybe plants in colder environments grow slower but develop richer nutrients or some way to preserve resources through the cold. Our real world does that with plants creating dense seed clusters or fruit to give offspring a boost to survive the temperature swing, and some plants develop ways to go dorment to survive winters. There are also other plants that develop some means such as flowers or odors to attract animals to help spread seeds.
I guess what I'm saying is maybe the next step is to introduce evolution into the plants.
Unsure if someone has asked before but have you made your code open source or (understandably) have you kept it private?
I'd love to have a look at it and run some simulations myself.
If you do have a private repo I completely understand, and I'm excited to see what comes next. I really enjoy your videos on this!
Hi! At the moment it’s private as I am considering turning it into a commercial game, but I was considering doing a tutorial on setting up a basic simulation for the community to build on, if that sounds interesting?
@@EightLittleBears Yeah, that sounds awesome! Looking forward to that coming out 😊
Amazing video series! Idk if you already implemented it, but I think you should include at least two more factors for animals, rest periods (aka how long do they sleep) where they can spend a round or more sleeping and conserve energy a lot of carnivores sleep most of their day, it would also help animals in colder regions as they can eat less and sleep more and the ability to gain stores of food, aka that they not only eat when hungry but to have more fat on them maybe an expansion to their hunger and the ability to move their food priority upwards.
Additionally idk if you did that already but meat should give more calories than plant matter, mainyl because it takes less energy to digest and is directly helpful, but also because unlike the plants we eat most herbavores eat plants that are not very nurishing like grass, especailly when you substract the energy needed to digest the food meat is a much bigger plus. So maybe adjust the calories given by each food source too and see what happens it should lead to much more diversity in strategy (if you didnt do it already)
This video : Gives a whole new perspective to that phrase in the holy books the final generation ! Think about it a training model for souls . The final generation being giving a light body and moved to heaven ? We are inside grand theft auto 911 !
I don't wish to nitpick but since it's a simulation I thought it important to bring up the fact that tho we tend to think of herbivores as strictly vegetarian, that's simply not true, deer, sheep and cows etc have been known to eat meat like birds, snakes and even suck on bones to get important nutrients, so a 0.0 calculation I would say is inaccurate.
Very nice! As a fan of making and watching evolution simulations, this is one of the best!
Yep very fun
Let's gooo!
Maybe you should simulate without that much graphics. I'm excited for what comes
Aaaaand... I go to watch the next video and find out you're already doing what I commented on the previous video. :p
To allow the cold zones to support life couldn’t the animals have some sort of sense that winter is coming and then have the opportunity to hibernate or migrate? I’d feel that would allow for the species to adapt to the harsher environments.
Hey, I just found you
And this is craaazy
But here's my money
So take it maybe
Since you have seasons, maybe you can transfer over to using Köppen climate classification
Just a pedantic nit pick… but when the earth is tilted in the winter and summer it’s not a different amount of sun hitting the earth. It’s that it’s the same amount, spread over a larger area.
Has nothing to do with the actual video though so feel free to ignore me lol
I kinda wish the cold effect was a little less white, it's a bit too hard to see the enviroment below.
Also, I really love your videos!
If you want to simulate evolution better you could have some plants better for the cold and allow over time plants to slowly mutate to better fit there environment, aswell you could have some animals that are better suited for different temperatures allowing for the north and south not being empty as there are penguins in real life
I think your creatures need some good benefits from specializing in a nieche to diversify and occupy biomes
Carnivorous panda sounds fun? Seek for the panda clip that eats a bird. Its in 4k and yes its real
Evolution of migratory behaviors would also be rather fascinating to see
Hello
hi
I absolutely love this series and am so happy every time you upload the next part!
Thanks so much!
I have no idea how it took me so long to find your channel. Keep up the good work 👍
Maybe a thing that should also be implemented is gradual climate changes
Would it be difficult to add an "autosave" after a set number of rounds?
Is dam good. My suggest for making more diverse and Endurance world Is add the insect. Insect have tò use a very small quanity of food, High ratio of re production and small dimension. This probably bring a lot of omnivora feed only of that and left tò the real carnivori the task of hunting big erbivors. That probably can be a help for the simulation for sustain itself in Life. This Is the best advice i find ti suggest you. Season Is ok
Thanks!
Do you have an alpha / is this open source? I'd love to take a look
You almost made rabbits at the end! Haha cant wait to see what this grows into
Very few evolution simulators impliment plant evolution, which is very important. Anti-nutritive compounds, in particular, drive a huge amount of specialization in herbivores and make omnivory or predation more viable .
It’s in the plan! Still in prototype mode mode but this is one of things I’m hoping to implement in 2021!
Definitely a good idea, but it seems like it needs some fine-tuning.
The entire simulation was pretty samey.
Still cannot wait for very rare, but major geography changes in landmass!
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah geography changes will be nice!
I love your videos! You might not have a million subcribers, but you definitely deserve it! 10/10 :D
Wow, thanks!
Always wanted to make something similar to this.
I noticed that you use hexagonal tiles, but the world overall is a rectangle.
Have you considered switching to a hexagonal world? It would also be closer to our real planet where the equatorial latitude is biggest, whereas this simulation has equal space at every latitude.
Yeah it is something I am considering. The nice thing about a square is that you can use a regular coordinate system. Not a big deal really, but pretty convenient ha
You should consider making seasonal periods much longer to allow creatures to both settle there and leave there as migratory creatures. Excellent work though!
That’s an interesting point.. will try that!
soomething that may help with more migration, to access bigger parts of the map (and help in extreme environments):
depending on perception value a creature can also see tiles that are further away and choose to go there if it makes caloric sense.
I like the idea about perception. One thing I was thinking about was separating it out into different types, so sight would be short range but very precise, smell would (potentially) be more long range but less precise, etc.
Could there be a way to simulate hibernation?
Perhaps add extinction event like a ice age or a meteorite
In real life, many if not most animals in temperate/boreal climates hibernate, or at least reduce their activity levels during winter as a direct response to lower food accessability.
Yeah, this is something I want to implement. Planning to do it alongside some sort of reptile update since cold/warm bloodedness is an interesting concept in itself, and there’s probably a lot of code that can be shared between that and hibernation!
Is this evolution or ecosystem simulation? I haven't watched the other videos but it seems odd that you'd have to modify the variables so less creatures die from age which results in everyone dying instead of increasing/making a proper reproduction system allowing for a new generation of creatures by the time the previous all die.
Just an observation, correct me if I'm wrong!
It’s both I guess. There is a reproduction system, but for this particular version of the sim the environments were pretty volatile so I just tweaked some of the base settings to compensate. It’s a work in progress 😃
@@EightLittleBears Looking forward to the next videos regardless! I assume you have done research on predator-prey differential equations? (Lotka-Volterra equations, predator-prey model, etc)
This is great but one problem with this simulation is we can't see how creatures adapt. All i see is same boar with small scale variations.
Yeah I agree - I am looking into some solutions to this (maybe some form of outline) which changes with a particular stat, but I think part of the problem for this particular sim was that we genuinely just had very similar builds..
multithreading or multiprocessing.... bigger map with more resources and maybe a reduction in precision to make it work better like only tracking things to three decimal points so it runs better. dynamic events like asteroid strikes. More in depth evolution with dynamically generated images using dalle-3 or something you could feed in a json of the different qualities about a creature and get it to make an image for you of a 8 armed sloth with 2 mouths. Also having winter seasons vary in temp on a 23000 year cycle like they do irl would be pretty cool. and maybe having the 12 year solar cycle could be cool too
Make it a game and for mobile devices too
You could over many turns change the terrain to see how enviromental change affects the population
That’s in the long term plan for sure!
Super excited to see your next version.
have you seen the bibbits ? i imagine you guys would have quite an interesting conversation
I love the bibites!
They be getting seizures over there lmao
So so much Love great video!!!
Imagine getting number 42 😂
Pls release it on mobile
I want to download it
How can i get my hands on it