Found a backup of one of my lockdown projects. I only had the jar left so I had to decompile it, edit it to be usable, and then recompile.
Download the simulator.
The jar should be easy to run once downloaded. Requires Java.
Screenshots
Controls
- X/Z to zoom in/out.
- Arrow keys to pan camera
- F to follow a creature
- A/S to cycle through creatures to follow
- T to view/exit the tree of life
- R to enter/exit rapid mode (freezes the screen to compute as fast as possible)
- Space to split the continental plates
More info
Animals are colour-coded just to distinguish the main branches of the evolutionary tree from the last universal common ancestor. The main circle-colour represent different major-branches, and the inner rings represent different sub-divisions within those branches. Don’t be alarmed when they suddenly change colours, that just means a branch has died, changing the LUCA. Later the colour-coding system doesn’t really work so well and just highlights major divisions. I will likely revise this colouring-system later to better highlight the sub-differences within the major branches later: I would like these sub-divisions to work based on the LCA of the major division.
The plants in the northern hemisphere and southern hemispheres are digested differently, so creatures may become adapted to specialise in digesting one sort of plant but not the other (typically resulting in speciation).
Animals zap eachother. Sorry, that’s just a part of life. Zapped animals turn black.
Whenever a creature is born: there is a small chance that it mutates into a new species with randomly adjusted stats. New species are given different names and (mostly early on) are annotated with different colours.
On the tree of life: This displays the different species and their ancestors. A species that has accumulated 50 members will have an asterisk next to its name to indicate that it is significant. Asterisked species (and their ancestors) will remain on the tree even if they and their descendents go extinct, immortalising themselves on an imagined fossil-record. Red species names are extinct, black names are extant. This tree is navigated in the same way as the environment view..
As with my old maze game, I believe that I have made more advanced versions in the past. Specifically, I recall versions that archived peak-population data and some species characteristics in the tree of life. These may be reimplemented later. I would also like to add in greater customisation options for the user. For now, any modifications and experiments will require you to decompile the jar.