Evolve

Im baaaaaaaack! Lets go. I actually had the honor to go to an in person game dev event in NYC and even met Zack and some other amazing members of the hackclub team there, it was a blast. Anyways i also did some work on Evolve including some shader fixes for outlines (they didnt really look good on plants…), some general system fixes since the code base grew quite big and also isnt the most beautiful, fixed some IK issues that had been bugging me, implemented a lot of the #TODOs (: Anyways not really a lot of big new visual stuff so i just made a little animation of creatures and some plants hope you enjoy! (as always please test the game at https://boredvoidater.itch.io/evolve and tell me everything u got to say) byeee

another big update this time, i noticed i was getting kinda lazy with the amount of devlogs per hours i promise ill do better first
up is hormones: Adrenaline, Fear, and Aggression that the brain can hook up to. unlike
normal math nodes that instantly flip on and off, these hormones smooth
out over time so it is kinda like the memory nodes but
they actually force the creature regardless of brain architecture to do specific stuff like turn away from everything, run faster, …
second part: plants cus else creatures are all just carnivores. PlantDNA controls: branching depth, how many branches per node, Phototropism
(fancy word for growing towards the light ) vs Gravitropism (gravity
pulling branches down). meshes only get redone if there is substantial growth and ye, thas it
do yall think of the chemical brain stuff? any ideas for other hormones
or plant types i should add? let me know in the comments

another big one this time added blinking eyes, moving mouths, eye movement just for some nice touch and then decided it’s finally time to give da animals a little bit of a brain. The system i decided on for now is a simple “neuronal network” kind of thing. I got a bunch of nodes like: sensor for vision/smell/time, math add/multiply/min/max/relu/…, memory basically just decaying values over time, actuators Move/Turn/Bite/Flee. these modules can then be linked up kinda like unity shader graph (thats why my ui look like dat lmao) the nodes are then connected via neurons that store a weight (which will later be adjusted via, who guessed it, Evolution). Addition of all the math nodes adds some complexity that i am quite a fan of. To recreate an idling cycle for example one could use a sin wave and time, … Anyways that’s all for now next up is probably instincts/hormones or sum else didnt decide yet. Any thoughts as always in the comments. Oh ye i also fixed webgl rendering via adressables (loading resources).

Hello everybody, i was away for a week in kopenhagen (great place they got a bunch of cool animal museums as well and a trex head replica 1 to 1) but have finally returned. Now 1 of the 5h was spent on various bug fixes that i do not remember the others were spent on adding survivability stats. Up until know we only had weight, energy requirements and speed but now there is also attractiveness (eg a vibrant colored flower would have high atractiveness) and warning (also based on colors though also adapts per enviroment to fit in camoflauging into the same stat). then i added modular organs (eyes with different pupils, mouths with sharp teeth, no teeth or round teeth), snouts out of the same mouth shape, ears, … i also did some experiments with eyelid shapes but just landed on texturing a simple sphere since the 3d eyelids look like too much in my opinion (top left corner in devlog) what do you think

A lot of changes in this one:

1. Growth modifiers for regions like head, neck, abdomen, … give more granular simulation control over animals
2. some new features like frills and scales
3. new textures for various skin types like fur, feathers, scales, …
4. me fighting with huge necks (see image )
   next up i am gonna organs which im planning to make very universal using parametric 3d models

I’ve been hard at work over the last few hours and made (a lot of) modifications: first i struggled with winding order for a solid hour before i just decided that i am not gonna win that fight (now i just don’t cull creature backfaces ), then i implemented muscles and fat which change weight and volume of limbs and as you might be able to see colors and textures for the skin, next up i also did some IK improvements (@august pointed those out ), last but not least i added features like little spikes and scales. Also can we talk about how cute the starfish looks, its my favourite part about this project so far. all the creatures below are created with dna structures eg: (i’ll put the code here once i figured out how to format it nicely lmao) and animated proceduraly… (ignore the ape i made it a lil too fat )

This one took quite a while but i finally got some meat on the bones: triangle winding order is a pain in the but soooo i’m just rendering front and back faces now , even more annoying is getting it to not twist with every single movement (still not fully working), still working on how the dna could sensibly define head shape since rn everything looks like megamind, UVs are next to tackle OH GOD PLEASE SAVE ME . Put ur favorite creature in the comments (as well as any feedback ofc xd)

Work on IK is now nearly complete (for now ), now we move onto bigger any better things: putting meat n skin on the bones but first of all here’s some movies of stuff moving (the spider one is fixed dw)

I’ve improved the IK through changes to: billateral limb distance (so
far there was nothing in between for example 2 legs), timing
adjustments, joint rotating planes, computed target body height and body
center of mass, … Next up is animating limbs that aren’t legs! any
feedback?put it in the comments (pretty please)

FINALLLY starting work on Evolution with the first subject being animals. So far i’ve set up a DNA Structure that works in a bone like fashion with symmetry options. on the simulation layer these bone and thus resulting body shape will be represented like Position. Velocity, Mass,CenterOfMass,BoundingRadius, Height and prolly more that i didnt think of yet. As you may be able i’ve also tried my luck with IK with the FABRIK solver but so far yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah….

Did a little more work on the water shader, i swear i’ll start with the Evolving part after this xd

I’ve been working on an option to switch the layer to underwater since that is just as important as above water for us to see. Did quite a lot of work on the shader so now the above water terrain gets cut at sea level and its dirt color gets dithered into a fullscreen underwater shader with caustics and godrays, it definetly still needs imrpovement but its good enough for now

This one is more of a cleanup where i finished some boring stuff so nothing that cool to showoff but i attached some screenshots. Also built the newest version of the game for all platforms (and web) and updated itch page. Feel free to give it a visit under https://boredvoidater.itch.io/evolve (:

Aaaaaaaand another one about culling, this time the goal was to remove the particles from the river because, well, it looks bad. This took quite some time to solve but in the end i just calculate some spheres with diameter of river width and get rid of all particles in it

Very quick and dirty one but i implemented particle culling since the particles would look really bad when zoomed out with the pixel art rendering…

I’ve been working on some decorational particles on the terrain to make it loss less bland. These are however purely for visuals and not gonna be included in any evolution calculations (which i promise i’ll start doing at some point (: but for now i wanna finish the world generation, regarding that any ideas for what should be added to world gen in the COMMENTS!!)

I’ve been working on the UI for a little bit which is a task i do not enjoy doing since i never like how it turns out. this time around the end result looks more like a cheap ai website than a good ui but oh well there will always be future possibility to make it better. Please put any ideas for making it look better in the comments

Give it a play at: https://boredvoidater.itch.io/evolve
I’d also be amazing if you’d check out my other devlogs if this project seems interesting to you

i added rivers with width based on calculated flow and custom generated meshes. I am still thinking about another thing: in real life rivers sorta get momentum which causes them to cut trough terrain which i think would probably look a bit weird in my case but i still implemented the momentum but not the cutting so now sometimes rivers flow “up a tile” like a reverse waterfall… Not sure if i’ll keep that we’ll see

I finally fixed the poles turned out i had my textures messed up and frozen water eg ice should also float ontop of the ocean ofc (: I also improved upon the water shader by reading depth and reconstructing the y pos difference from it

improved the world generation with more interesting terrain with more variaty (stacked noise, different noise types, …) also imrpoved my simulation of humidity and made it get way colder towards poles, finally finished all the textures for the bioms and added a little water shader. Added camera movement and zooming to boot. thats it i belive, cyu in the next one

the biomes are pretty much done, however i still got work to do regarding the biome simulation since what should be the poles is currently not ice biome but tundra in my generator (:

Applying texture based on biome information (saved in uv’s so that we can still use srp batcher)

have been spending some time on implementing my first attempt on landscape. landed on hex tiles since they are the easiest to simulate since movement in all 6 directions is the same distance and now spent some time visualizing the generated hex map

I’ve finally finished the outline shader which is now looking a little bit unorganized but thats ok (: Also got some headache from the transparent rendering pass hogging my rendering textures since i didnt specifically declare which pass wants them which took quite a long while to figure out

Highlight color is now detected based on sampling surrounding pixels and choosing closest based on death, also experimenting with light on outlines

added a custom cell shader that can also use textures (black and white) to blend between colors and uses either only one color or textures based on shader keywords

I’ve been working on a pixel perfect outline for this nice pixelized look and also shaded it according to surrounding colors instead of just black, it is based on a custom id texture and normals because i believe this is more reliable than just depth data. next up is cell shading