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Well, I guess traits might be much easier to track… I’d suppose all these Stats would add some sort of overhead to keep track of, right? If performance would take a hit for that… then I guess it should at least be an optional thing whether to track it or not :P

I’ve been thinking about some other filter ideas, and not sure if you think these are interesting to implement or not, but it’s some things that might be nice to be able to check during the game (specially for finding the critter with the highest and lowest scores):

• Age: something like how many in-game minutes the critter has been alive
• Total accumulated energy: how much energy the critter has been able to eat during it’s lifetime
• Total distance travelled: distance the critter swam in it’s lifetime
• Total damage healed: damage it healed over it’s lifetime
• Total energy wasted: amount of energy the critter ate while at 100% energy (correct me if I’m wrong, but I critters do eat over their full capacity if they can, and it would be good to know this to watch out for potential overeaters)

I was thinking of these mainly as I’m trying to figure out a way to find fit critters to save. I was using fecundity for that, but having other stats like that could be interesting to try and select some traits and save some good critters - specially if you wanna encourage sharing.

I’m not sure how you could calculate this, but I seem to see a lot of my critters eat their own eggs/offspring/siblings, as it could be interesting to try and see that with some filter, as it’s also an undesirable behaviour that we’d like to keep them away from. It pains me when a critter puts a lot of eggs only to circle back in a perfect circle and eat 3/4 of its own eggs… sigh.

🤦‍♂️ Worst thing is that I had even seen that before already… and somehow simply forgot later on. Still, editing things in text format feels easier for me than messing through the UI haha I’ll definitely stay tuned then! Looking forward for future updates!

Thanks for being vocal, btw, running on Linux here as well <3

I have no idea about this, but is the GUI something that slows down the game? I was thinking and wondering if having a pure command-line interface to continue a specific save would be feasible, and if there would be any gains in speed of the simulation for doing so - the reason being that it might be interesting to use that when leaving the game entirely AFK for long periods of time, which I believe most of us do anyhow. Turning off the GUI of the game entirely and letting it just run in the background somehow for faster performance - at the fastest speed the processor is able to handle, not limited to x10?

Bump 2

I was wondering as well if there would be any place in the code where you could use some GPUs to speed things up.

I noticed that the time seems to pass quite slowly on the largest map size with around 200 critters, even on x10, and though one process is indeed using 145% CPU, but it's spread out around different threads and no single thread is above 50% usage (except for a few peaks at 55~60%), and it doesn't seem to be using any considerable GPU either.

Should I be seeing higher CPU usage for this (at least one thread going up to 100%)? Or is this normal behaviour? 

Running on Linux, in case that matters (Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS).

(Yes, I know I shouldn't be running a game on the largest map size, but I couldn't help myself and had to try it - even though I haven't filled barely a fourth of the map lol)

First of all, thanks for the amazing game, I'm having a lot of fun with it here!

I was checking the save files for critters and noticed that there's some information stored there in plain text... but most of it is just the headers/variable names, and almost all the 'relevant' information uses different ASCII characters. I copied a critter file to try editing the species and individual name (one of the few 'custom' info in plain text), but it ended up crashing the game once I tried to place it, so I guess that is impossible for now.

I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow access that info in a readable (and most importantly editable) format, since most of it seems quite straightforward when seen ingame (even the neural network seems based on specific weights and decisions on each neuron, so could probably be translated into a JSON file). The idea of adding some 'intelligent design' here and there is always interesting to mess a bit with Evolution games testing weird changes and ideas - or at the very least to be able to name our species with fun and interesting names! :P