[h3]Dear EvoLife Fans! [/h3] EvoLife v0.7 is finally here! The most visible feature is the Tree of Life displayed next to the game world, but a lot happened under the hood. See the list below for details. The save files used to record the trailer are available as in-game save files, so you can check out the creatures yourself. With the changes implemented, sadly, I had to break backward compatibility with old savefiles. If you find any bugs, or have a feature idea I should implement, please feel free to reach out to me in the Steam forums or Reddit. The week after the release is the hypercare period, I freed up my calendar, won't have anything else going on (except my 9-5 job), I will focus 100% of my free time to squash any bugs that may pop up with the new release. I am just a guy, I could test this release on an RX 6750 XT, a GT 710 and an NVS 4200M. To remedy this issue I want to provide a free demo you can try out, to check if the game works on your machine. It will take some time for Steam to review my demo, stay tuned! Please make sure you have the newest drivers installed for your graphics card. Demo limitations: [list] [*] Only the smallest world size is available [*] No built-in savefiles from the trailer [*] No DNA editing [/list] [h3]In this release[/h3] [list] [*] [b]Tree of Life[/b] : Finally the DNA tree is not just calculated in the background, but displayed in all of its glory. Find the most prolific species or niche filling ones at glance. Follow real time as new species are generated with mutations from established species! [*] [b]Vulkan backend[/b] : The graphics API has been abstracted away, so switching between graphics APIs is now possible! Vulkan is now also supported next to OpenGL. Vulkan is a difficult API, hard to get right. Current performance is a little bit worse than OpenGL on my AMD card, but a lot better than OpenGL on my Nvidia card. Check what works for you! [*] [b]Fluid drag[/b] : Has been completely rewritten, now circle particles and joints both can push the fluid and the fluid can push back. I am not 100% satisfied with the result and I feel like it is important to get this right for jellyfishes to work, but it is a great first step in the right direction. [*] [b]Settable parameters[/b] : Got all hardcoded physics, biomineral and cell parameters out as on-the-fly configurable from the GUI. Create worlds with crazy high gravity, weird rules, or change the energy required for life to sustain itself. [*] [b]Viable default species[/b] : Two viable species are default-generated on each world, one gas eating and one dead cell eating. If no proper organelle exists in the world to create these species they do something random and most likely die after spawning, as they wont have any means of getting energy. [*] [b]Highlight multicellular formations[/b] : Clicking the "select species" tool, there is a button to highlight all cells that are currently connected to an other cell. [*] [b]Cell spawning spawner fields[/b] : A long requested feature finally done, you can create spawner fields that spawn living cells. [*] [b]Runtime optimization[/b] : On the performance tab, I put an "optimize" button. Different video cards, different graphics APIs, and different world run best with slightly tweaked parameters. This button will launch a sequence to try and find the parameters that works best for the current scenario. The simulation will be slower while the optimizer runs, but after it is done I got about an extra +5% speed in most use cases. [*] [b]Reworked population count sync[/b] : Nvidia cards had an issue with getting the population count displayed in the GUI in the previous release. I reworked this code to be no longer a problem. [*] [b]OpenGL discrete video card[/b] : Found a solution to request the discrete video card from Windows, while using OpenGL, without fiddling with Windows display settings. [/list] [h3]What I want in future releases[/h3] [list] [*] [b]CUDA support[/b] : CUDA is compute only, I checked OpenGL-CUDA and Vulkan-CUDA inter-op. OpenGL seems easy, Vulkan seems complicated, but sadly the CUDA compatibility promises are broken for graphics inter-op. I have to think about how to best support this. [*] [b]Sexual reproduction[/b] : The meme "sex update" everyone would talk about. Sadly it would break half of the simulation, the whole species system, the DNA tree. Would increase the GPU memory usage by a lot. But would be really nice. [*] [b]Better GUI[/b] : UI/UX is a big part of the feel of the software. I plan to hire a freelancer to help me out design an interface for the 1.0 release. [*] [b]Steam Workshop[/b] : I plan to do it for the 1.0 update, I would hate to break savefiles uploaded with a release. [/list]