Beyondrepair: As Droplet has some of the basics of the engine that I will be using in future proprietary releases, I'm not yet ready to open-source it. As the engine becomes further detached from Droplet, releasing the source code should become a real possibility.
I definitely encourage anyone interested in developing an evolution toy to strike out on their own with it - I think that it isn't as ungainly a proposition as it at first may seem.
Everyone: I'm hoping to release the next version either today or tomorrow. New features include saving and loading, as well as a basic settings file which will let you mess around with the dimensions and population caps and so on.
Also, my friend at Lexicon-Labs released a new version of Evolution. It now uploads your successful creatures to his server, and populates your game with other people's creatures.
Thanks for all the encouraging words and patience 
Alright, it's your decision.
Though I'd like to say it's not necessarily easy to gain anything out of a single person's proprietary code (you have to go a long way before anyone considers to purchase it, e.g. as with Dwarf Fortress). Still, I'm having high interest in your further development and will follow it closesly.
Suggestion: Genetic programming is even more fun than genetic algorithms in general IMO, e.g. at work I use genetic programming to develop AIs for card games for mobile apps and find strategies I could never find with just parameter set optimization. I don't know if you employ a fixed parameter set atm, but maybe GP tree could be used to represent a multicelluar plant/animal, thus describing how cells should grow from the original stem cell, rather than just considering each cell individually. Maybe this would work, maybe not, depends on how many cells you can put into the simulation without it lagging - in general you need a population of 500-1000 individuals to get meaningful evolution with GP.
Foot note: I developed a clone of the old game SimLife (no longer active), code can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwevo/, which is remotely similar to your friend's game.
Also developed a "cell soup" application similar to yours, though I never released that. I guess I'll revitalize that with some of your concepts (e.g. using chloroplasts) and see how it turns out. Don't have time to make anything that looks as good as your game tho. ^^
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Topic: Droplet - An Evolution Toy - Updated 9-1-2011 (Read 18309 times)