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Original post by Wavinator You can carry this further out into the future. A solar civilization will consume a certain amount of energy, yet the sun itself only can give so much-- yes a staggering amount by present standards but still fixed. If you converted all the matter in the solar system into fuel (ridiculous to us by not maybe to an energy hungry species growing exponentially) you'd still run into a hard limit. As Stephen Baxter in his book Deep Future points out, even a stellar civilization could overpopulate itself into oblivion, and even billions of years in the future it's conceivable that, if we're still around, there'll be energy barriers to surpass.

Interesting. Traditionally as society becomes more advanced - higher standards of education and health, extended lifespans, etc. - population growth is reduced. Presumably at least partially responsible for this is the cost of raising a child increases as well. But with technology driving the price of knowledge to zero (we've been successful in artificially inflating the price of education through increasingly arbitrary pieces of paper thus far, but I insist this will eventually fail), more actively keeping us healthy, and, eventually, providing an abundance of food, I can imagine this trend reversing.

I wonder how Baxter explains it. I am very sad to discover that neither of the libraries to which I have access have that book. Not surprising, I suppose, since I can't find it for a reasonable price anywhere.

Also, it just occurred to me, this reminds me of the Kardashev scale. I also found this recent critique of the scale while searching for the name of it.

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Original post by klefebz Pete Michaud, what you are talking about is SimLife, an old game by Will Wright, it was just that. I played it, really boring, not for the graphics, it was just like it played itself.

Just because that implementation was boring doesn't mean they all would be.

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Original post by Pete Michaud Quote: Original post by klefebz Pete Michaud, what you are talking about is SimLife, an old game by Will Wright, it was just that. I played it, really boring, not for the graphics, it was just like it played itself. Just because that implementation was boring doesn't mean they all would be.

Also there was SimEarth, i know it was also Will Wright's and it may be his foult it so self-playing.
I don't know about other games with evolution sistems, i remember "Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life" but it was not actual evolution, it looked more like pokemon evolution, something turning instantly into something totaly diferent.
The fact is that if you use random evolution, and trait generation people will never get what they wanted, i.e. you wanted a birdman, but you only got lots of mutant dumb lizards. you say "i put those trees so they evolve into birds, not adapted lizards!" and "how do i pressure them to be smart? not even the scientists know what pressured human ancestors to sentience"
this concept, in my opinion would be better for enemies, so you fight evolving monsters.

If you want to make a similar game, make sure you play EVO (for SNES) to see the other major example of how it's already been done. EVO is extremely difficult so you better grab some cheat codes while you're at it (since the goal of research would be to see the whole game). But it's fun.

My opinion of Spore is that it failed because their goal was much too broad: make 5 games with the time and budget for one game. It wouldn't be impossible to combine the cellular and creature stages, or combine the tribal, civilization, and space stages (though that would take a ridiculous amount of art assets to do well, and homogenizing the gameplay more), but between creature and tribal there's a significant break in the gameplay concept. For an indie developer in general, you could barely manage to tackle cloning any one stage of spore, much less more than one.

I'll also add that eating other creatures to get evolution points was one of my favorite parts of both Spore and EVO, I'm skeptical that changing that would improve anything.

And yeah, I played both sim life and sim earth, they were rather boring.

I've heard and read about EVO, well, before continue to do this i should find it.
And it's true about the stages. Last nigth i was thiking it would be better to eliminate cell stage and start right out from a slug, now i think it shuld be just animal stage, it would end with creatures with fire, spears and steeds, because it's not needed to be sentient for that, at least IMO.

A slime/blob might be a good first creature to start evolving from. That's like an amoeba but because it's bigger it would live in the same basic world as creatures. I think EVO starts as a fish and you evolve legs to become an amphibian.

Well, i just finnished "EVO the search for Eden", I haven't even evolved to human by the end, I was something like a rhino-bull-lion, ha ha ha!
Will Wrught complained about the pennis cretures in spore, but in EVO the final boss is a giant amoeba wich attacks you with a supesized male organ. The worst is that since i wasn't human I had to.. bite it to death.
The game is funny but short and IMO too much "jump evolution" except in that for evolving to monkey you had to choose rabit body and cat mouth, with those it actually looked like a small white monkey out of a little cat.
Also you can't choose what to take to sentiece, if you want frog-men you cant, that was the good thing in "Evolution: the game of intelligent life" it was more sandbox and you could make dino-men, bird-men, elephant-men, wombat-men and humans.

I have a good design... same genre... and it's original... and I want to keep it that way so I completely ignored what you guys said, looked for keywords, and skipped 3 pages.

As for evolving creatures (thank you pokemon), I've actually been thinking of that a lot lately. I now think it IS in fact possible to evolve creatures in a videogame in a way much similar to the way creatures evolve in real life. Unfortunately, I'm going to let you come up with your own idea on how to do it. :P

For an example see Creation: Life and How to make it. I'm not sure it's actually possible as nobody's yet released the code. I suggest an open source project under a commercially usable license. (especially as the creatures nervous system development is a LOT of trial and error) As for me... the time invested is not worth the rewards... sorry. It's a self preservation instinct thing.

looked more like pokemon evolution
Maybe it doesn't have to.

Spore is awesome! Disclaimer: never played it.

Kelfebz, Sim earth whale men, sentient machines, and more... at least the old SNES version did. Good luck. And I suggest trying Creation... I have yet to see a recode of it, but it should be epic if it's possible.

Just open your mind... and download the spore animation pdf. n.n And try creating something original.

The glitch is that... creating a competing game is really rather pointless as it would have to compete... why do that? Why not create something truly original that stands apart from everything? Why not be the next Wright brothers?

If you want to differentiate yourself, let them create the creature they're evolving into and slowly evolve to become it. Then they can continually update their creature without ever reaching any of the creatures they make and virtually shape the evolution. You could even make monkeys, lizards, etc, and switch them as the 'evotarget' to create horrible monkey-lizard hybrids! YAY FOR ORIGINALITY!!!!
I find the best way to be creative is to act like a little kid for a while. And learning can be faked by having behaviors activated after a series of attempts or watching someone else perform the behavior... or you can get the real deal off of one of those sony Aibo's they let roam wild in a warehouse somewhere. (Man I want one of those).

Good luck, can't wait to play.

[Edited by - electroreactive on January 18, 2010 6:49:40 AM]

This is an amazing video (BBC's The Secret Life of Chaos):



Skip to about 1:30. This video makes me drool for the future of games.

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Original post by abstractionline This is an amazing video (BBC's The Secret Life of Chaos): Skip to about 1:30. This video makes me drool for the future of games.

That's pretty old news, actually.