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Author Topic: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics  (Read 13460 times)

bersaelor

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #15 on: November 22, 2014, 05:24:44 am »

Thanks for all the support gals&guys, it's really amazing, we also got featured on tigsource now.

I'm about to fix some some stuff that I thought of in my sleep (it's morning in Berlin atm) but I thought I'd answer your questions first:

Q&A:

First: "I like the concept. What about reproduction? Spreading new colonies? Inter-colonial warfare? Anthill coalitions?"

Let's talk a little about scale&scope.
As you all know, Dwarf Fortress' FPS drop once you have 200 dwarves (+ assorted NPC's in the map amounting to maybe 600 individuals).
Our current prototype can handle about 500 ants + 1000 npc + 1000 plants and 10k liveless objects without dropping the framerate on an iPad. A Desktop PC doubles this. Since I only spent a year worth of saturdays and 3 months devoted time to it yet, there's still a little room for optimization, so let's add another factor of x2 and we arrive at 2000 ants and like 40k total objects.
Now you can all do the math about how many colonies we can have in one game given those numbers.
Also on average each animal/plant has a double set genes + a ton of variables governing it's metabolism so that saving all the individiums of more then 2 colonies would put stress the memory of modern computers.

1. Will there be different species? Like Slaver Ants?, Army Ants? and polygyn (a hive with many queens) and monogyn (hives with only one queen?)

There will be different species, but in gameplay terms I am highly sceptic whether it will be fun to only give the player only one species to play with at a time.
I'm tending towards letting the player start with your run-of-the-mail garden ant with a Queen that just landed from her nuptial flight. And then you can unlock more genes/castes/abilities as you discover more males that can mate with your queen. Some army ant species do this, where the queen(s) mate with multiple males during their lifetime that get carried to them by the workers.
Think about Plague INC, it would be pretty boring when you start out as a Norovirus and can only unlock abilities that Noroviruses have in Real life. Instead you get to progressively unlock more Symptoms/Infection pathways that are never possible in one real life pathogen (thank god for that!)

@Queens: I believe I might include some tolerance gene/ability that allows you to have more then one queen. So "polygyny" will definitely be a part of the middle/late game.

2. Will it be more scientifically accurate with different species only having different ants and specific mechanics (aka leafcutters can grow fungus but slaver ants can not, but in return get to keep slaves)? Or will it more likely be a freeform system?
I will have both species abilities but I'm tending towards freeform, see reasoning above  :)

3. Do you intend to include different seasons?


Yes, as you have seen in the video we already have a day/nightcycle (hooray for OpenGL Lighting), and we can make leaves fall already. Since our plants get pollinated and different phases (flower bud, flower, pollinated flower, seed head ..) seasons will be the next step.
In cold climates we might skip the winter though and just make the workers die and the queen sleep at the moment of the first snowfall?

4. Will humans make an appearance? ( the big foot out of the sky...run for yer lives!)

For starters I was thinking of shrews attacking insects/ants. At the scale that you look at the game they'd already be quiet scary.

5. Will you be able to invade other Ant-Hives and take their hives?

Maybe, but then I have to write AI for the central management of a hive. See multiplayer

6. Will there be a multiplayer option?

Unfortunately, synchronising games, sending package updates back and forth between players etc is a ton of work. The first game I ever wrote was a hexagonal chess-like 3D Game and I worked 3 months on the multiplayer alone. Therefore in our current quiet restricted timeplan that we have after the kickstarter-campaign it will not be included but it is in the strech-goal's.

7. Will the game in scale be like Dwarf Fortress, or will you be able to actually expand into a farch stretching "Ant-Empire"?

Very much like Dwarf Fortress. For the mentioned reasons above, I'd like to simulate each individual living being with attention to detail. If you have an ant-empire with many hives that would not be feasible with modern computers. If the project is succesful and maybe we have computers with 10cores in ten years, who knows, maybe we can have one hive per CPU?

8. Is there going to be a campaign?

Yes, but I haven't worked at it so much yet.
You know this feeling when you observe an ant hive, and everything first seems so chaotic yet every ant seems to have some reason for whatever she is doing at any point? I want to capture this feeling and let players enjoy and control this flow. Currently working on the logistics of an ant-hive, making individual ants transport goods from outside to stockpiles and from there to the queen/nurseries.

9. What about "animal husbandry?" Will ants be able to domesticate lice and milk them for their sweet, sweet sugar?

That was planned since the first time I had the idea for this game in my head. I was reading Jared Diamond's Third Chimpanzee a year ago where he talks a long time about the fact that humans totally didn't invent animal husbandry ;)

10. I hope ant empire functionality works - it could be like that when you create new colony, you are given choice between which one you want to control and hand other over to the AI... otherwise I assume player burden will be massive.

I think the player burden would not be different then in dwarf fortress. Most processes are automated, and you only have to plan them. Also we will have a Dwarf Therapist - like menu right in the game  ;)

11. As a geneticist (I guess that the way to make it into a title) by trade and training, this looks so. cool. Definitely keeping my eye on this. At first I was a little lukewarm, but the more I thought about a modern Sim Ant-ish sort of thing where I can actually fiddle with genetics, the more excited I got. You could even indirectly select for better plants by making sure the bad ones get taken out by your ants.
Thank you for the compliments and interest. The genetics are basically the same simplified system that Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd) describes in  his latest book 'What If' page 158. In case you haven't heard about it, as a scientist you should check it out. (And tell me what you think about this system!)
The idea with ants weeding out the inbred plants (you know, we have asexual and sexual reproduction) sounds amazing, thank you for that!
« Last Edit: November 22, 2014, 05:27:10 am by bersaelor »
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Zireael

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #16 on: November 22, 2014, 07:32:44 am »

Ooo, color me interested. Any place we could check out the beta?
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LoSboccacc

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #17 on: November 22, 2014, 07:37:58 am »

Ooo, color me interested. Any place we could check out the beta?

seconded. is there a demo?
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darkflagrance

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #18 on: November 22, 2014, 09:52:40 am »

Could you briefly clarify the genetics system to those who haven't read Munroe? I'm always curious to hear about the implementation of theoretical mechanics in sims like this!
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bersaelor

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #19 on: November 22, 2014, 12:00:18 pm »

There is no demo yet as I have given the prototype to a few friends but is no menu, save/load function or help menus, so it's not so user-friendly right now.
I'm hoping to get to more development this weekend (might try streaming some on twitch) so I can send a first demo to the people that have talked to me already during the next week (Send me a PM if you have a Mac running OSX 10.10(Yosemite) as aside iOS thats the only testing environment I use at the moment).

Really short about the genes:
Basically each gene is associated with an attribute (STR, DEX, CON etc) and can be a number ( Randall Munroe uses 1-18) or a multiplier (x0.5 - x2.0). Now each animal has a double-set of genes/chromosomes for each attribute, where the resulting number is the higher one of both, or the Number multiplied by the multiplier. If both attributes are a multiplier, the resulting number is 1, i.e. really bad. That means an XX-multiplier result is like a genetic defect in a gene that only happens if both parents where carriers and both gave the child their multiplier gene.
Now to make matters slightly more complicated, hymenoptera males are haploid so only have one copy. Some plants are multiploid, they can have 4 copies.
But I really wanted to get to some development today, so I'll leave it at that for now, what do you think?
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dennislp3

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #20 on: November 22, 2014, 02:11:36 pm »

I am all for the more complex! Seems like a good system to me
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bersaelor

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #21 on: November 22, 2014, 03:25:00 pm »

PS: In another forum someone questioned my professionality and whether 20k are even close to getting such a project done.

Let me assure you, I don't mind if I don't make any money with this (the kickstarter is there so I don't have to finance designer, translation, audio with my private savings anymore). I do lot's of well-paying projects for clients (one recently one an award) , so it's really nice to have something more challenging for a mathematicians mind in between ;)
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qurvax

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #22 on: November 22, 2014, 04:41:02 pm »

maybe we have computers with 10cores in ten years, who knows, maybe we can have one hive per CPU?

Erm, excuse me, but in our universe theres already things like this...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
;)

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RAM

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #23 on: November 22, 2014, 05:29:07 pm »

What of nomadic, opportunistic, or other ants that do not build traditional nests?
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Moogie

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #24 on: November 22, 2014, 10:56:18 pm »

maybe we have computers with 10cores in ten years, who knows, maybe we can have one hive per CPU?

Erm, excuse me, but in our universe theres already things like this...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
;)

H...how are you using over 100GB of RAM? And How do you even have that much RAM? And can I borrow some money?
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dennislp3

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #25 on: November 23, 2014, 02:06:25 am »

Judging by the fact that the machine also has 24 cores I would say it serves it rather well as a high end server machine or a machine meant for crunching large amounts of complex calculations.
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Moogie

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #26 on: November 23, 2014, 02:50:21 am »

Just think how big of a fortress you could run with that. You could easily have, like, 300 dwarves before the slowdown sets in.
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bersaelor

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #27 on: November 23, 2014, 06:40:05 am »


He has... 384GB of RAM.


I want to develop on such a beast!  :o
Instant code compilation...
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Mipe

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #28 on: November 23, 2014, 06:43:32 am »

Never mind that insane server, what about other hiveminded creatures? Namely my favorites: bees!

Honeybee how I love thine honey...
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bersaelor

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Re: Formicarium: combining DF, Ants and Genetics
« Reply #29 on: November 23, 2014, 10:43:18 am »

Never mind that insane server, what about other hiveminded creatures? Namely my favorites: bees!

Honeybee how I love thine honey...

We do have bees and bumble-bees as pollinators, but except them being responsible for the sexual plant reproduction (bringen genes from flower A to B) they are not really interactable.

Bumblebees dig underground hives, so would be a nice addition player-race when you get bored of the ants. I was already thinking we could add hive-bees/wasps etc as a spin-off/addon once everybody is bored with the ants.
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