Concept
The concept of this sketch revolves around simulating a dynamic ecosystem where virtual entities, referred to as “Vehicles”, interact with their environment. These Vehicles exhibit behaviors akin to living organisms, such as seeking food, avoiding poison, and reproducing. The core idea is to create a system that demonstrates basic principles of life, such as survival, adaptation, and reproduction, in a controlled digital setting.
Sketch
Implementation
Mechanics
The Vehicles are programmed with various attributes controlling their motion and decision-making processes:
- Motion: Defined by velocity, acceleration, and steering behaviors.
- Energy: Acts as a life resource, gained by consuming food and lost by ingesting poison or over time.
- Intelligence (Intel): Influences decisions, such as prioritizing food over poison.
Environment
The Vehicles inhabit a space with two primary elements:
- Food: Beneficial items that increase a Vehicle’s energy.
- Poison: Harmful items that decrease energy and can lead to death.
Reproduction
Vehicles reproduce upon reaching a certain energy threshold. Offspring inherit traits from their parents, allowing for the potential evolution of more adapted Vehicles over time.Expected Challenges
- Balancing: Ensuring a stable ecosystem where Vehicles neither overpopulate nor die out quickly.
- Performance: Managing computational load, especially as the number of Vehicles increases.
- Adaptation: Fine-tuning the evolution mechanism so that beneficial traits are meaningfully passed on to offspring.
Next Steps
- Stats: Adding certain stats to each species like energy, hunger, and evolution.
- Diversity: Introducing different types of Vehicles with unique characteristics. The goal is to add 3 new species: prey, predator, and apex predator.
- User Interaction: At certain time intervals, the user is given an option between 2 modifiers for the species, and must pick between them to try and keep the ecosystem alive