Part 6.2: Q&A
And we’re back with the questions that people had for the Q&A! Let’s see what feedback people had.
@DmitrisTerlegkas from Twitter asks:
Who the hell has time to write 10k words??? Give the man who wrote all that a metal and a raise
Me, and technically I shouldn’t have the time but I’m carving out what free time I can. A medal would be cool though!
LibertyBellSeven from Reddit asks:
Good stuff! My main concern about auto-evo is that it will produce similar and unnatural looking creatures. How can the algorithm generate lifeforms that can compete aesthetically with the player-species?
To which I answered on reddit. Here's the response I gave:
That’s a good question, and part of the answer is that it’s hard to give a straight answer since both Auto-Evo and the Organism Editor are still works in progress and haven’t been finalized yet. It’ll become more apparent how to address issues like these once we actually finish designing those.
However to answer your question as best I can right now, there’s a lot of physical, chemical, and biological reasons that creatures on earth look the way that they do. Hopefully, if we implement realistic enough rules and boundaries in the game, it will drive the creatures generated by Auto-Evo to approximately fall into believable looking aesthetics.
One example I can think of is that we’ll calculate the frontal surface area of any organism, and that will reduce their speed if they live underwater. This will tend to cause underwater species to go for more streamlined shapes to have higher speeds underwater, and have a more fish-like appearance as seen on earth.
Another example could be putting hard limits on where certain mutations can occur, since evolution always works with what DNA is currently available. For example a species might start evolving legs on the sides of its torso with the new leg bones evolving out of the existing spine bones, whereas we wouldn’t allow a leg to start evolving out of an earlobe. However, maybe that creature has very unique ears that have bones in them that could evolve to split off and develop a leg! The point is though that plausible biological and physical limits will exist to make things look more natural.
Solitarian from the Community Forum asks:
Actually the plan is to make the algorithm specifically note what kinds of movement organisms use and have that affect their survival. Some differences will be clear, such as underwater patches being specifically different patches than terrestrial patches and containing different species. However, there will of course be grey areas. There are birds that dive into water to catch fish, there are amphibians who live on both water and land, etc. I’ll address that all in future parts once we get major obstacles like predation, combat, and metabolism out of the way.
MisterMustachio from the Community Forum says:
I have to wonder how you’ll calculate the overlap of species in separate environments. A species may encounter a number of other species, but isn’t likely to encounter every member of those species, nor is every species likely to encounter every other species.
Species within a patch are assumed to pretty much interact with all of the other species in the patch. The differences will be between patches. Species A might overlap with Species B in some patches because they both exist in it, and not in other patches since only one of them exists there.
Those were all the questions from this Q&A. Unfortunately my free-time has been limited so the next part likely won’t be ready for another week. However, if it makes you feel better it’s because the next part includes some major changes.