Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Andeerz]

A more basic problem with evolution isn't the timeframe, but rather, the way that creatures are handled.

In real-life evolution, the development of any major organ has to be weighted against that organ's cost in minerals and energy, which in turn means more food - if that organ doesn't help that creature get more food or breed more frequently, it is not worth its cost, no matter what its other benefits, and it will not develop.  (Vestigal organs being an oddity/artifact.)

In DF, there are only two major factors: being tough enough to survive combat, and, much more importantly, breeding speed.

Why would creatures not evolve impossible physiologies that enable them to survive, like [no_pain] and [no_fear]?  Why would non-breeding creatures like Bronze Collosi ever stand a hope of surviving the onslaught of fast-breeding, pain-immune, giant super-groundhogs?  Especially since the short maturity rate of most animals compared to larger creatures ensures that evolution in a one-year-to-adult creature happens twelve times faster than a twelve-years-to-adult creature? Also, what keeps herbivores weaker than carnivores? 

Agreed.  This game doesn't quite have the sophistication of biology needed in order to adequately address natural selection.  I think we should simply focus on population dynamics for the time being.  Perhaps as the biology in the game becomes more refined in the coming decade or so natural selection could be touched upon.   

SimLife is relevant as well.

   

Indeed it is!  This game pretty much contains everything I'd love to eventually see in the modeling of biology in DF.  It contains not only mechanics that allow for decent population dynamics modeling, but also contains mechanisms that address precisely what Kohaku was talking about with regard to energy and nutrient costs and the like.

Anyway, playing around with SimLife for a bit gave me some ideas, though these ideas mean little since I don't know exactly how DF represents the attributes of its own animals.  I'm curious how DF and SimLife compare.  Animals in SimLife possess attributes like gestation time, litter size, visual acuity, size, stealth, weapons, life span, and behaviors such as propensity for food-sharing and aggression.           

[NW_Kohaku]

Anyway, playing around with SimLife for a bit gave me some ideas, though these ideas mean little since I don't know exactly how DF represents the attributes of its own animals.  I'm curious how DF and SimLife compare.  Animals in SimLife possess attributes like gestation time, litter size, visual acuity, size, stealth, weapons, life span, and behaviors such as propensity for food-sharing and aggression.           

I don't think I ever played SimLife, since SimEarth was so difficult for me at the time that I was a little child trying to play it without having any real understanding of what, exactly, was going on.  (I could still "win", regardless, but I had no idea why.)

Anyway, most of these attributes in DF are either boolean, like aggression (they are either predators or not, benign or not, and ambush predators or not - and once un-stealthed, they are permanently unstealthed), hard-coded (gestation time is basically a year, regardless of creature), with only a few things raw-controllable, like litter size and life span.

Really, the only thing close to having a fair degree of nuance and complexity is the simple act of having a skeletal and organ system, which only matters for damage purposes.  And in the current version, most organs don't even do anything (losing your pancreas has no real effect on you, even though it would be fatal in real life), although more organs are supposed to be vital in upcoming versions.

Of course, Toady may (and likely will) eventually change all these things... But I wouldn't count on it being any time soon.