EvoLife v0.5 is out!

EvoLife

Create and evolve your own digital lifeforms! Watch or interact as your creations adapt and thrive in a world governed by the laws of physics. Download now and start your own evolutionary journey!

[previewyoutube=XTle_Xx_v6o;full][/previewyoutube] We arrived at a big milestone: the first multicellular lifeform has been evolved out of nothing. I feel like this is a very important step worth celebrating. If you want to check it out it is in the upper left corner of the built in savefile "first multicellular". I've completed so far the biggest overhaul in the history of EvoLife. I added a smell system. I want it to be analogous to how pheromones are in the real world. I also added a biomineral system. I want it to represent the the bark of trees, the hard shells, the bones, the claws and the nails of the animal world. Cell internal workings are completely redesigned to allow for more flexibility while adding simplicity. I removed the v0.4 "sense" ability which worked even trough walls. Now cells can sense touch, damage taken, smells and environmental vectors (fluid speed, cell speed). I plan to add a raycast "seeing" in the future. The last piece of simulation code running on the CPU was the system responsible for randomly changing the DNAs during mutation. Now this last part also runs on the GPU, so fast forward is possible without CPU-GPU synchronization. I completely rewrote the way joint constraints are handled, the system is much more stable and robust now. I also modified how circles interact with the fluid simulation. It is now closer to the F ~ v^2 of the real world. This will need some more tuning, as there is no feedback yet for the sake of numerical stability. I added a slight wobble to the surface of the cells, I'm not satisfied with it, but it is what it is for the time being. Sadly for all of this to happen I had to break savefile compatibility. EvoLife v0.5 can not open savefiles created with EvoLife v0.4. So much stuff changed internally that there are no meaningful conversion between the two. I'm just a guy coding my own dream game/simulation. My beautiful girlfriend helps with testing and branding materials but we can not catch all bugs. If you find one please do not hesitate to reach out and make a post here or on Reddit. Before I add any more features I want to prioritize bugfixes and features requested by the audience. As a sandbox game everyone plays it a little bit differently and I want to accommodate everyone's needs. List of thing that I wanted to add but had no time to implement, coming up in a future release: [list] [*]DNA evolution tree visualization [*]Better cell internal representation (graphics and GUI) [*]Graphical overhaul, fancy shaders [*]Steam workshop integration [*]Support for smaller screens [*]Chinese translation [/list]