todd

Genetics of an inkblot city

Further sketches (i.e. scripting) some ideas in Here Be Dragons - Including a video clip showing a hasty city metamorphisis.

Rendering as I type this, I should have a movie showing (by a sort of time lapse) the climate simulator in action, showing how heat, wind, and moisture can visualize (for starters) cloud movement. I'm still working on the best ways to visualize (or convey through audio) rain, snow, wind force, and other implicit consequences of these systems...ah, here it is...

People talk about needing more interactions with virtual characters than just simple conflict - this also goes for environments. Most environments in games and other interactive settings are static, typically because it's much easier to optimize such a space for computer performance. Physics simulations promise more dynamism, but most depictions I see are cosmetic.

The spaces here are the result of a fairly straightforward interaction of variables like wind, rain, and heat - the player can change these, providing short term obvious consequences and longer term less obvious ones. Even at this stage it's possible to irrigate regions to provide plant life, or scorch an inland region to create a desert. The agents themselves are starting to get perception of these worlds, gaining sensations of the environment around them. At this point the difference between a city and creature is a simply visual - that will likely change but I mean to explore the oddities of this potential life cycle.

Each creature/city contains a "gene" - crossbreeding is possible, but for genetic programming to work one needs a fitness function to determine how successful a gene is at a given task. In this case the world, climate and all, provides the fitness function for a given gene. There won't be a single gene that will always be successful in an uncertain world. Hopefully this means the space will maintain a state of change, and, therefore, animism.