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This post was imported from a personal note. It may contain inside jokes, streams of consciousness, errors, and other nonsense.
Regarding level of abstraction, I’m not interested in evolving eyes I want to evolve the behaviours like hunting, mating, using terrain, group cooperation, etc. Remember the goal is a game where you explore this ecosystem and discover interesting things about it and make use of it. Become part of it.
Speciation would be cool but that’s a longer term thing.
Also long term but I got to thinking about event traditions. If I gave all creatures awareness of longer cycles like the moon phases, seasons (and thus years), and I dunno, eclipses or something it’d be neat if they evolved traditions around those.
Maybe we have long term event traditions to remember that we are situated in a long continuum we all share?
Or to mark the passage of time? Or to inject different behaviours in times when it’s beneficial to do so (I read somewhere about a midwinter feast because the meat would go bad if stored any longer).
I could go on and on about things I want to model. Assessing potential prey, territorial clashes that don’t result in death, marking territory, assigning someone to patrol while others rest, sticking together in a herd, mirror neurons influencing behaviour, storing food for later, hunting in packs, food chains and apex predators, investing resources in status symbols or even crippling one’s own abilities in order to show status (Peacock feathers again), symbiosis and parasitism, scavengers, migrations ooh that would be crazy.
Probably start the populations in a place where the influence of seasons is minimal. As they travel outward they will need to learn to adapt to the cycle of seasons and that will take longer. Need to develop a genetic memory.
How would you even do migrations? Need memory of the terrain?
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I did a tiny bit of cleanup. Moved the keyboard input handling out of the simulation and back into main.cpp. Now SFML has been completely eliminated from the simulation.