v0.1.9a is live!

v0.1.9a hits a few major milestones: I observed some interesting and unique cell strategies emerge when a species of cells evolved that used the heat generated by their mitochondria to kill other cells and feed. Eventually, these cells replicated too much and killed themselves off, being replaced by stationary, bulky cells with large energy reserves. This is exactly the kind of unexpected emergent behavior that I have been hoping to see happen since starting the project. Also, I finally got culture saving and loading to a functional state, as well as manual placing of saved species. Finally, all world types have been consolidated into one chunk mode with dynamic sizing, and world creation sliders have been improved. I feel more confident than ever that development is on the right track and I can't wait to continue building. Up next is the nutrient overhaul which will introduce typed nutrients (aminos, lipids and sugars) and a complete overhaul of the tooltip UI and player interaction which will allow for controlling groups of cells, proper species lineage tracking, and a dynamic tooltip that displays contextual information based on zoom level. Thanks for testing! Full changelog since v0.1.6: v0.1.7:

• Major slime mold update (foundational for Nutrients overhaul):

• Bidirectional flow

• Edge reinforcement and decay

• Amoeboid creep

• Mutable budding thresholds

• Major emergence and balance changes:

• Harsher diminishing returns for organelle stacking

• Expanded mutable metabolism rates

• Widened gene mutation ranges

• Removed some artificial constraints

• Collision tweaks for improved stability

• Fixed bugs preventing environmental penalties from properly scaling with crowds

• Rudimentary world settings exposed in new game panel

Known issues:

• World creation UI is highly WIP - typing effect broken

• Spawner sometimes places all plasmodium cells at 0,0

• Mitosis jitter during fission

• Enzyme particles buggy

• Population balance off (boom/bust cycles)

• Performance degrades at high cell counts

• Save/load broken (inconsistent)

• Chunks worlds broken (large/open) v0.1.7a:

• Improved mitosis performance spikes during mass population booms

• Partially fixed cell interaction + tooltip not finding cells

• Partially reduced cell jitter in tight spaces

• Partially fixed bug causing slime mold networks to permanently stall

• Metabolism improvements and bug fixes

• Cell spawner improvements and bug fixes v0.1.7b:

• Fully fixed bug causing slime mold networks to stall

• Updated flow visualization on slime mold branches

• Greatly reduced dense substrate left by cell corpses, increased basal substrate deposits

• Modified flagella/cilia gene scaling and visuals

• Various GPU/CPU consistency fixes v0.1.8:

• Consolidated world types into one unified chunk mode + slider

• Various bug fixes and improvements to chunks

• Added pressure/impact death for overcrowding and barrier collisions

• Improved cell movement behavior

• Cells can now sense actual pH and temperature (was frozen at defaults, oops)

• Reworked temperature to be more transient and lethal

• Reworked pH systems: neutral cells no longer acidify, cell metabolism deposits pH based on pH tolerance. pH vacuoles actively engineer pH niches.

• Removed default enzyme bias towards acidity

• Fixed slime molds hoarding energy. Full networks now overflow into increased byproduct particles

• Rebalanced energy economy (fixed a 100x slime mold absorption bug and inflated conversion rates)

• Fixed systematic directional drift in cell movement (cells no longer wander up-right)

• Fixed major memory leak with Chunks (~100-200 MB/sec)

• Minor performance improvements

• Various visual and UI fixes v0.1.8a:

• Slime mold adjustments:

• Removed redundant surface collectors from starter plasmodia cells (absorption is via branches)

• Fixed branch absorption on GPU (bug was masked by surface collectors)

• Tuned overflow particles

• Particle byproducts now spread much further, supporting motile cells more effectively

• Fixed organelle aiming bugs. Energy cost now evolvable with tracking speed trade-off.

• Fixed world generation acidification bias

• Added pH Center world creation slider

v0.1.8a-1:

• Fixed overly aggressive balance preventing motile cells from surviving v0.1.9:

• 4 new gene axes:

• Tolerance range width/environment damage rate (wider tolerance survives almost everywhere at the cost of persistent residual damage, narrow tolerance takes 0 damage at optimum but quickly dies outside of range)

• Metabolic rate/movement cost (low idle drain for expensive movement, high idle drain for cheap movement)

• Organelle maintenance scaling gene (Cheaper organelles at the cost of increased genome complexity)

• Mitosis complexity curve gene (r-strategists/K-strategists: Simple cells can divide rapidly and cheaply, complex cells invest more in their individual off-spring) v0.1.9a:

• Implemented various save/load fixes (needs extensive testing)

• Implemented fix for slime mold corruption during long runs (needs extensive testing)

• Fixed cell spawner with saved species

• Improved behavior where cells would get stuck in substrate and rapidly oscillate (partial fix, may still occur)