Creature Kingdom

New Post: Original Terrarium now released

bsimser — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:35:08 GMT

I've just released the original .NET Terrarium code here on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/terrarium2). This is actually the unreleased 2.0 version that has been updated from the 1.x version that was public. Should be fun to see where the two projects go now.

NEW POST: Areas for Development

Gineer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:03:32 GMT

I know a guys who was also interested in a project line this when I looked at it. He was quite good at graphics and the like. I'll forward this thread to him and see if he would like to get involved as well.

I like the fact that you organisms can be small enough to be bacteria on other organisms. That just opens it up so much. I have not been able to run the app yet though, the place where I'm working is still stuck with VS 2005. I'll try and run it tonight at home.

Could you possibly post some of your design documentation here though?

David

nathanjphillips wrote:
I propose we focus on things that will make the project look good first so that people we see what we've done will think there is something here worth joining with. Fortunately these items shouldn't take too long:

finish off ImageRenderer
while we're at it, make sure that IRenderer implementations can't draw outside of the area of their Organism (guess this can't be done by setting a clipping rectangle since the implentation could always reset that? If so then we need to create a new Graphics object for each organism and blt the contents into the main output)
add a simple second sample organism so that the samples can interact (I have one but it is too complicated to include as a sample)
create a bitmap or wmf for each of our sample organisms and use ImageRenderer to show them
create a logo / icon for the project
make the world form look nice (give it a background image, add zoom and pan controls using the ViewPort Bounds property)

After that we need to look at a WPF interface (I've made a start but not checked it in) and security - someone needs to get their head around IL parsing and how that was used in the original Terrarium project without doing anything that will make this a derivative work.

NEW POST: Areas for Development

nathanjphillips — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:19:25 GMT

I propose we focus on things that will make the project look good first so that people we see what we've done will think there is something here worth joining with. Fortunately these items shouldn't take too long:

finish off ImageRenderer
while we're at it, make sure that IRenderer implementations can't draw outside of the area of their Organism (guess this can't be done by setting a clipping rectangle since the implentation could always reset that? If so then we need to create a new Graphics object for each organism and blt the contents into the main output)
add a simple second sample organism so that the samples can interact (I have one but it is too complicated to include as a sample)
create a bitmap or wmf for each of our sample organisms and use ImageRenderer to show them
create a logo / icon for the project
make the world form look nice (give it a background image, add zoom and pan controls using the ViewPort Bounds property)

NEW POST: Progress

nathanjphillips — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:14:36 GMT

Sorry for the delay in publishing the CreatureKingdom project, but I'm pleased to announce that, as some of you will have noticed, I published a very imperfect cut of the source code earlier this week. I'd not been making progress on getting things to a state where I'd have been happy checking them in so just committed what I had. I think they are Visual Studio 2008 project files but I've used .Net Framework 2.0. I'd be happy to move to 3.5 as long as we leave the Organism and Sample Organism projects on 2.0. So, work items... I propose we focus on things that will make the project look good first so that people we see what we've done will think there is something here worth joining with. Fortunately these items shouldn't take too long. I've posted some suggestions in the appropriate discussion.

Source code checked in

nathanjphillips — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:01:55 GMT

Added TODO comments to show what needs finishing off

NEW POST: We going to move forward with this?

jgalley — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:17:51 GMT

Thanks for the initial posting Nathan. Do you have anything you wnat me to look at?

UPDATED WIKI: Home

nathanjphillips — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:45:59 GMT

Not a port

This project is not a port of the old Microsoft Terrarium for .Net 1.1, for that see Bil Simser's project called .NET Terrarium in Related Projects to the right. This is a new game based on similar ideas. Bil's project has a massive headstart over this one and assuming there are no licencing issues with it I consider his project to have a much better chance of getting to a usable state quickly. I encourage you to contribute to his project instead of this one unless you feel that a rewrite is needed because of fundamental gameplay flaws in the original Terrarium.

Project Description

A replacement for the old Microsoft Terrarium game to run on .Net 2. Creature Kingdom provides an environment for organisms to live in where each organism is represented by a piece of code programmed by a player of the game.

Featuring:
* A lightweight interface implementation model for organism development rather than an event-driven model
* A large set of organism statistics, many of which are interrelated
* A non-grid based map
* A single large world map dynamically distributable between processors
* No upper or lower limits on organism size, allowing virus-sized parasites living on other organisms
* A proper concept of sight and camoflage, not allowing 360 degree vision or seeing through other organisms
Cannot resolve link: [image:Basic Screenshot.gif]

Details

As you write code / start to understand bits that other people have written, please share the knowledge in the appropriate section of this wiki.
For users
How to write your first organism | Advanced organism development | Organism strategies
For developers
Solution overview | Design documents | Architecture description

Not Yet Released

There are no binary releases for this project yet, download the source, build the whole solution and run the WinForms Client to see the project in "action" (OK, it doesn't do much yet!)

Source code checked in

nathanjphillips — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:33:21 GMT

Used normal convention for ignore file Removed projects not checked in from the solution file

Source code checked in

nathanjphillips — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:13:04 GMT

Inital check-in of basic source, in a very imperfect state, but I'm not making progress so might as well commit what I have.

NEW POST: We going to move forward with this?

jgalley — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:46:11 GMT

I was wondering if we were going to move forward with this.
What do you want me to do with respect to work items?

UPDATED WIKI: Performing a Turn

nathanjphillips — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:37:44 GMT

A single turn is broken down into stages that occur in order across all Organisms:

Organism implementations decide what interactions and movement they wish to perform based on the state of the World at the end of the last turn
These decisions are updated into the OrganismInfo that will be visible to other Organisms
Interactions are processed (attacking / loving / singing)
Moving is processed
Giving birth, growing and dying is processed

This means that:

no Organism can see what another Organism is planning on doing when it makes its decision about what it is going to do,
an Organism can't approach, attack and then run away before its target gets a chance to attack back
an Organism can try and dodge an attacker by predicting which way the attacker will go and moving in a different direction
the cost of moving is easy to predict as it is based on the size of the Organism at the time the decision to move is made

A model was toyed with where the decision about where to move was made after interactions were processed, but I wanted to more closely simulate the situation where an Organism could move while attacking or defending. The direction that an organism is facing while attacking and moving is thus the same, which may mean that a trade-off has to be made between moving more slowly backwards and not being able to see where you're going but being able to defend well and moving more quickly but being more vulnerable to attack.

UPDATED WIKI: Organism Data

nathanjphillips — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:18:43 GMT

Organism Data

Organism data is stored in several places. OrganismStats holds an Organism's "genetic" information, data that doesn't change over an Organism's lifespan. OrganismData holds the organisms current information. OrganismInfo holds the information that Organism implementations can see about an organism (both their own and others). OrganismAbilities holds the OrganismData and OrganismStats and implements the logic that determines the combined effect of the various statistics on the abilites of an Organism.

Example Properties

OrganismData contains, amongst other things:
public uint Age;
public double Energy;
OrganismInfo contains, amongst other things:
public Color Colour;
public PointD Location;
OrganismStats contains, amongst other things:
public Genders Gender;
public uint PubertyAge, // When can start mating
public double Agility;
OrganismAbilities contains, amongst other things:
double Weight { get; }
double AttackDamage { get; }
bool Alive { get; }

NEW POST: Design Suggestions

nathanjphillips — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:14:54 GMT

There could be some milage in that and we should think about how components could be used to implement parts of the functionality of an Organism, but I still think this would be best done as a seperate project, even if it shipped in the main release.

NEW POST: Progress

bsimser — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:36:30 GMT

Hi guys,

Just an update. Got in touch with Brad and Eric and Brad hunted down Lisa Supinski who's working with me right now to get legal to approve the source release. Hopefully we'll have it done by the time the project launches.

NEW POST: Design Suggestions

bsimser — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:31:50 GMT

It's more work, but you could build a design surface in VS2008 for people to "drag and drop" organisms and their attributes. This would probably be the cats meow for this project. Let developers build the system visually. Learning developers can just set attributes and accept the default behaviors, hard core guys can dig into the code (still intially dragging and dropping parts of an organism visually) and tweak the behaviour to create the ultimate fighting creature! Check out the Presenter First DSL project for an example:
http://www.codeplex.com/p1dsl

NEW POST: Organism Statistics

bsimser — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:28:01 GMT

I would wonder about listing all the properties and trying to decide what goes where and would favor a behaviour driven system where you spec out how you want the organism to behave. That would drive out what specfications it needs in order to accomplish the tasks associated with a behaviour.

For example, I can think off the top of my head GrowthRate. Should all organisms grow at the same rate? Maybe not (at least in a real system different organisms have different metabolic rates at which they process nutrients). You could probably sit down for half a day and rattle off dozens of little niggly things like this but not come up with them all. However if you took the approach of "how do I want an organism to behave when feeding" that would drive out attributes and behaviours it needs to accomplish that. It would also allow you to build out the organism state in an incremental way.

NEW POST: Organism Statistics

nathanjphillips — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:47:18 GMT

I have added a page to the Wiki showing where different types of Organism data are stored.

Stamina is the equivalent of your maximum energy level, current energy level is part of OrganismData (called Energy). I simplistically assumed that EnergyGivenWhenEatenLive would be the same as Energy, though this is obviously not true, it is something that will need adding to OrganismAbilities. We need a formula for working out the energy used by movement, I have a simple version of this in at the moment that does not take account of the speed at which the Organism is moving. We also need something to work out the energy used when attacking.

What I am more interested in here is the static, "genetic" data that we should store about an Organism. Are there any more properties that should define what attributes an organism is born with? Are there any of the ones that I've suggested that should actually be derived from other properties?

UPDATED WIKI: Organism Data

nathanjphillips — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:33:31 GMT

Organism Data

Organism data is stored in several places. OrganismStats holds an Organism's "genetic" information, data that doesn't change over an Organism's lifespan. OrganismData holds the organisms current information. OrganismInfo holds the information that Organism implementations can see about an organism. I am also considering adding OrganismAbilities, which would hold the OrganismData and OrganismStats and implement the logic that determines the combined effect of the various statistics on the abilites of an Organism.

Example Properties

OrganismData contains, amongst other things:
public uint Age;
public double Energy;
OrganismInfo contains, amongst other things:
public Color Colour;
public PointD Location;
OrganismStats contains, amongst other things:
public Genders Gender;
public uint PubertyAge, // When can start mating
public double Agility;
OrganismAbilities would contain, amongst other things:
double Weight { get; }
double AttackDamage { get; }

UPDATED WIKI: Organism Data

nathanjphillips — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:32:59 GMT

Organism Data

Organism data is stored in several places. OrganismStats holds an Organism's "genetic" information, data that doesn't change over an Organism's lifespan. OrganismData holds the organisms current information. OrganismInfo holds the information that Organism implementations can see about an organism. I am also considering adding OrganismAbilities, which would hold the OrganismData and OrganismStats and implement the logic that determines the combined effect of the various statistics on the abilites of an Organism.

Example Properties

OrganismData contains, amongst other things:
public uint Age;
public double Energy;
OrganismInfo contains, amongst other things:
public Color Colour;
public PointD Location;
Organism Statistics contains, amongst other things:
public Genders Gender;
public uint PubertyAge, // When can start mating
public double Agility;
OrganismAbilities would contain, amongst other things:
double Weight { get; }
double AttackDamage { get; }

UPDATED WIKI: Organism Data

nathanjphillips — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:31:28 GMT

Organism Data

Organism data is stored in several places. OrganismStats holds an Organism's "genetic" information, data that doesn't change over an Organism's lifespan. OrganismData holds the organisms current information. OrganismInfo holds the information that Organism implementations can see about an organism. I am also considering adding OrganismAbilities, which would hold the OrganismData and OrganismStats and implement the logic that determines the combined effect of the various statistics on the abilites of an Organism.

Example Properties

OrganismData contains, amongst other things:
public uint Age;
public double Energy;
OrganismInfo contains, amongst other things:
public Color Colour;
public PointD Location;
OrganismStats contains, amongst other things:
public Genders Gender;
public uint PubertyAge, // When can start mating
public double Agility;
OrganismAbilities would contain, amongst other things:
double Weight { get; }
double AttackDamage { get; }