#DevLog #7 last one

the UI

the plate used to be the whole window with a cramped row of numbers on
top. now it has a frame and everything else has a home: a header with the
controls grouped, a legend bar naming every colour, and a sidebar with
four panels ecosystem (pop, food, generation, births, deaths, and a bar
splitting grazers / mixed / hunters), trends, recent (an event log), and
selected.

selected is my favourite bit. it draws the creature the way the plate
does, then its family line, then all 8 traits as bars with a tick on each
bar showing the POPULATION average. the bars used to tell you a number;
now they tell you if this thing is fast for its time. clicking also rings
the creatures living family on the plate, so you can watch one line take
the plate over or die out.

the part where i found out the sim was fake

i ran the world headless for 900 seconds and printed the totals. 231
immigrants. the population was parked on the immigration floor, which
means the ecosystem could not feed itself and was being kept alive by a
drip of random strangers.

the fixes: food comes in patches now (with even food, speed was a bad thing
scramble trait everyone hit max speed and then nothing could catch
anything); sprinting costs energy so a chase is an endurance chase; panic
only when the threat is close AND faster; the cost moved off the gene and
onto the chase, because taxing the trait dug a valley no mutant could
climb out of; and meals got small and frequent so the plate reads as
grazed.

thanks for following along