Future

This page is for talking about specifically the future of Evagents, topics like what direction to take, efforts that will be made, and hopes of the development team. Currently the team exists of exactly 1 member, so take it easy on me!

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Near Future:

  • Facilitate the survival of carnivores! If each round of updates doesn't fix the issues with carnivores, we'll keep working on the problem until we get a near-guaranteed stable population of carnivores within 1000 epochs.

  • Introduce more GUI features and mechanics to give users more information and ways to gather that information. Specifically, scale up or down event splashes, add more drawing options, and even more crazy: rotate the view with the selected agent while controls are active with the end goal of making a "survival mode" minigame!

  • Speaking of survival mode, fully implement a working "neural net training system" which allows agents to "learn" to reproduce the user's directions for the selected agent, thus allowing users to take more direct role in evolution of the agents and providing an interesting and educational mechanic.

  • Disassociate even more constants so that .exe users can edit them (stuff like NUMEYES, CONNS, and other global settings).

  • Find ways to make more agent diversity, preferably by getting more of them to co-exist independently in the same area.

  • Add more land/water types: mountains, swamp, deep ocean, deserts, rivers, reefs, and more. Would have to sharpen land/water penalty, while keeping it possible for agents of one extreme adapt over time to the other. Order would probably be something like Desert (1)>Mountains>Land>Swamp (0.5)>Reef/River>Water>Deep Ocean (0).

  • Add more debug features, and maybe options to turn different parts on or off.

Distant Future:

  • Create main menu UI. Allow loading, creating, and managing saves before starting the sim.

  • Add MORE sounds/music! Refine the agent audio system and ambience.

  • Allow agents to "terraform":

    • Terrain can be adjusted very slowly up or down via a toggle trait "Dig". If on, terrain is subtracted from the world and "held" up to a max value, and then, if off, or if the agent dies, the "held" terrain is added to the cell they are standing in. Small amounts only for max hold value and for rate of pick-up. Cell layer would have to be compatible with continuous and not discrete values (not hard but restructuring is needed, will be done anyway when Cell layer switched out for vector instead of array)

    • Waste, plant, fruit, and meat could all be picked up in the same manner as terrain (concern: there would have to be discrete options for each cell layer which they can do this to, and I would like to navigate away from discrete things in general)

    • New trait, "warm-bloodedness", changes cell temperature towards its value. Temperature also could be increased by agent-agent proximity, and/or random fluctuations/weather patterns.

  • Touch sensors and hair. For now, eyesight seems to be enough to take this feature's place, so it might be unnecessary.

  • Armor: if carnivores ever do become possible, I will implement an "armor" mechanic where agents can use this trait to take a penalty to movement and turn speed, while also reducing the damage taken by spikes, jaws, and collisions.