It seemed a rather innocent idea: a week before the release of the flower update, rent a cheap gaming setup in the cloud, let it stream The Sapling with random mutations on, and watch what happens. When testing this idea, however, it turned out that there is a lot of time for things to go wrong when streaming 24/7... so everything that can possibly go wrong will eventually: think of memory leaks that only show up after hours of play, or connection hiccups that make the streaming software stop (switched to StreamLabs last moment, which solved everything). It all resulted in many sleepless hours, but also in many fixed bugs. To make sure that a crash of the game didn't result in multiple days of progress being reset, I implemented a mechanism that made regular backups of the save file. It wasn't needed in the end, but had the unintended side effect that I can now go back to various stages in the 1 week simulation and relive what happened. To share this experience with all of you, I made a video of it: [previewyoutube=flmm-Y5KePo;full][/previewyoutube] The next devlog will be an interactive dive into the details of the optimizations I have to make the flower update work; it will be published around a month from now. Follow The Sapling on Twitter or subscribe to the newsletter if you are interested!
[ 2020-10-06 11:15:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
- The Sapling Linux [149.82 M]
Features
- Design plants and animals.
- Fast-forward time to and watch the ecosystem work like a charm or slowly fall apart (probably the latter :) ).
- A sandbox mode where you can skip time and turn on random mutation, allowing true evolution.
- An instinct system where you can specify what an animal should do when it hears or sees something.
- A procedural animation system so any animal can perform any animation.
- Procedural music mixed on the fly.
- Everything set up to be easily extended by players.
This looks just like Spore!
Wessel Stoop has wanted to play a simulation game where you can build your own plants and animals, put them in a world, and see what happens since 2002. You can imagine his excitement when Will Wright, the father of simulation games, demoed his latest game Spore to an enthusiastic crowd. When Spore turned out to be all game genres except simulation, Wessel decided he wanted to try to make the game by himself. The Sapling is the result of that attempt.
- OS: Ubuntu 16 or newer
- Processor: A processor with SSE2 instruction set supportMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities.
- Storage: 150 MB available space
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
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