DevLog #5 the time machine

you can now rewind the whole plate now. hit R (or the Replay button) and it
flips back into the last sixty seconds, scrubbing through the world a few
frames at a time while a replay bar counts along. watch a predator actually
pounce, or rewind to the exact second a whole lineage went extinct and see
why it died. press R or Esc and it drops you back to live, right where you
left off.

how it works
the world was already a pure simulation, so the time machine is just
snapshots. every quarter second the game copies the entire world, every
organism’s position, genome, energy, plus all the food and keeps only
the last 240 of those frames in a ring, which is about a minute of
history. when you hit R it stops simulating and just plays those frames
back. the copy is light because each organism only needs its traits and
where it is; the “who am i chasing right now” pointers that only matter in
live time get dropped, so a stored frame is tiny