I have a long running Alien simulation since some months (with power on and off based on my pc use).
I started with a "RGB Triad" Initial Setting preset. The incredible thing is that the three types of creatures are forming complex cell-like structures, with different approaches.
I have geometrical "crystals", long strings that try to eat others, spiked structures forming walls...is fascinating.
If someone is interested in building something like this but don't know where to start I would suggest https://natureofcode.com/
It's targeted towards beginners and uses a JS library but the ideas presented are general
Nature of code sounds like a book about code as such.
Would have expected to be the other way around: the code of nature
I think your intuition was correct, it is generally (but not entirely) about modeling behaviors from the physical world with code (for art rather than science).
Highly recommend
I fondly remember a flash game that involved small particles with their own unique behavior. Each particle could collide, react, transform, or destroy other particle material. I can't remember the name of the website or game, but emergent gameplay is always such a joy to toy around with.
"Powder Game"[1] is the Flash game off the top of my head that fits your description. If you're looking for a more fleshed out version with many times more elements/interactions, check out "The Powder Toy"[2]!
So many hours spent in these games :) Building distillation systems was way too fun!
Definitely a gateway drug to the sandbox/simulation genre for me (Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio).
Countless hours spent blowing up pixel cities, tinkering with the particle interactions, trying to make a sustainable nuclear reactor... fun times indeed.
Isn't this how Permutation City started?
Kinda, if someone ported Alien's rules into the Metaverse, and then went serverless
The first thing I wanted is not trivial to find (vids on github don't load for me), so here's a bunch of links:
https://www.youtube.com/@alien-project/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbMGPkoJmg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9R6zrdl6jM
also: not entirely clear how this'll work on Linux, at first glance it looks like it is restricted to a Windows + NVidia setup. Happy to be proven wrong.
This is a fascinating piece of software. I played with it briefly, it's quite the little evolutionary sandbox.
This is breathtaking. I watched a few videos, and am reminded of the alien evolution simulator that I am working on right now. But where my console-based program is crawling, this project is soaring through the sky!
I'm gonna have to get an external GPU aren't I ^_^
This looks great but how the hell do you pan the view?
Website: https://alien-project.org/
Prety neat! Looks like AMD might be possibility as some folks are trying to run it: https://github.com/chrxh/alien/issues/99
The visual aspect is important, but can you speed up the simulation by omitting the rendering?
Isn’t the idea that it’s running the simulation on the GPU; drawing to screen is presumably trivial, the physics is being run per-pixel so there is not much work required to actually draw the scene.
For me the visual aspect is very important. I want to have a fully browseable frame per frame result. Anyway you can avoid using render sync which basically let the simulation free to run as fast as possible with a minimal overhead for the drawing thing each X step
For me the visual aspect is very important. I want to have a fully browseable frame per frame result. Anyway you can avoid using render sync which basically let the simulation free to run as fast as possible with a minimal overhead for the drawing thing each X step