Update: biogenesis on hiatus

Both David and I are graduating and working on other projects at the moment, leaving no time for biogenesis. We both have a strong interest in continued work and a finished demo but will most likely not get to work again until late summer.

Progress: November 12th and November 19th

Here's a quick updated from the past two Fridays:

Progress November 12th:

David

World Cell Modeling

Started off by dumping the specific "Landmark" system in favor of a more generic one, based on a Model and Modelable interface. If an actor is modelable, it can return a model that has the model type interfaces for use by the cell. Models, when activated, return an Actor that can be placed in the game world based on its model. Note that for some simple objects (pretty much anything that isn't organism) this can be put all on the same class, and it returns itself (with some editing) whenever it asks for actors/models. Going to be working to catch up to goal over this week . . .

Ryan

Chemical System

Brainstorming needs more time. Decided to limit chemical interactions to binary or singletons (i.e. A + B -> C or D -> E + F with certain ratios). We figured complex chemical interactions wouldn't make much of a difference at this point and add an unnecessary level of complexity. Complex metabolic system of equations are going to be avoided as well. Not nearly enough done to stay on schedule..

Progress November 19th:

Ryan

FoodSpore Progress: nil :(

Chemical System Progress: lots! The FoodSpore class will be put on hold henceforth until the chemical system is implemented on even a minor level. The chemical system will be such: only xA + yB <==> zC interactions are allowed, and each can happen only within certain temperature ranges. I have a simple equation "solver" - which is ready to be plugged into the world grid for modeling. As of now we have functioning Interaction, Chemical, and PeriodicTable classes to perform the modeling, and a FindEquilibrium function that does the work on a modeling level. Next step is simulation which is going to take a bit more brainstorming, and hopefully implemented somehow within two weeks.

The FoodSpores will come soon, though!

David

Woo! Back on track. Converted the world cell system to a more abstract one, which allows creation of features on demand. It will need more tweaking as new (non-static) attributes are introduced. Started on a basic world generation system, having defined a number of geography modifying events, which will add features that are tracked by the world grid. Naturally these features have more purpose than just looks, but thanks to the new implementation, that should come easy as new stuff is added.

3 Month Plan

In lieu of last Friday's regular session, David and I met up today (Monday) and squeezed in a full 3-Month plan for biogenesis. Here's the short version:

• Major Decisions:
• World Generation, Environment, Food Spores, and a Chemical System will be our only focus. Organism, Evolution, and AI will come secondary.
• A Server / Client architecture will be included, time permitting. We decided to keep this in mind while developing.
• November:
• Food Spore
• Final decision on Chemical System
• Finalize World Cell basics
• Begin long term "history" brainstorming\implementation
• December:
• Finalize Food Spore implementation
• Begin Chemical System skeleton
• Ability to save game state
• Finalize World, History, and POI generation
• January:
• Chemical\World Cell integration
• CODE-A-THON: 5 days to finish the ties of various systems, depending on work done in Nov. and Dec. Bug fixes, testing, polish, etc.
• Final stretch of this plan, evaluation, and beginning of Organism implementation

The next three months will lay out the finer details of our long term goals of dynamic and emergent gameplay, exciting stuff!

See full version: http://code.google.com/p/ucf4053-biogenesis/wiki/ThreeMonthPlan

World Grid: Temperature diffusion and visualization

We integrated the grid viewer and world grid system with biogenesis' first metric: temperature. In the following animation, you will see a constant heat source in the center diffuse into the rest of the grid in various time steps. Currently, no energy escapes from the system.

Friday Session: Goals

The start of the weekly biogenesis session is now.

Todays topics include world-Grid integration and the test implementation of temperature/diffusion, and Blitzgren has a new temperature color hashing function that we will end up trying as well.

Ready . . . set . . . go!

biogenesis v0.1 gameplay

Here is a simple gameplay demo of v0.1 from back in May:

Official Blog

Welcome to the development blog of biogenesis!